We all have to live with deadlines, either they may be personal or business one’s.

The funny things with deadlines are that we all know we have them, we often set them up by ourselves and yet they have the force to really stress one up til madness. The most common deadline to be broken is the one you set for yourself. And the more shallow the reason the sooner and easier it is for us to break them, and no harm done, don’t get me wrong. But what this post is truly about are the deadlines that actually cause stress and problems for others that should be eliminated or at least minimized.

The thing with business deadlines are that they certainly affects others, either you want or not. So how could deadline respect be lifted from the gutter it has ended in lately?

The one to crack this will most probably be very successful and rich, and further more well liked in he’s/her’s work community. One of the problems these days are that the deadlines are strained to the limit and they push people to the edge. Time is money and therefore deadlines are set in my opinion too close for the end result to be satisfactory for everybody. When the project time is set to be too short it as good as always means that some corners are drawn straight which means the faults may be hidden as the end result is presented, but sooner or later they will be revealed.

The case the triggered this post for me today was a project i have been working on long days and even on weekends, just so that i would reach the customer set result by a deadline that was known to be idiotic. Well as a worker i have high expectations  on myself and the result i present. So this time i worked hard and including bending the rules to achieve the customer set goal. And so came the day today when the deadline was reached at 11:45am. I presented the result earlier during the morning and i transferred it to the production environment as agreed. 11:48am the customer sent me an email telling me not to move it to the production environment and that we would check the situation again next noonday. Meaning that they moved the deadline by them self, without a apology, or even a reason on why the wanted did this.

Cases like this really angers me and as soon as i heard the news my interest and urge to please the customer dropped like a stone. Why doesn’t the customer respect their own deadlines. I would like to know what kind of problems this resulted at their own end as the end-users should have had a seminar from 12am to 5pm where this was to be presented. Now as the order not to go live with was told to me there was nothing to present to the end users. 

Well, at the end the problem is not mine. When the command to go live reaches me i just have to do one simple thing and everything is set. As i did reach the goals for what the project was set for, there wont be any changes made anymore. So, when to go command comes i just launch the result and the customer will have to explain themselves to their bosses.

But it’s still very annoying and sad that these things happens over and over again all over the business world. 😦