Incremental Delay

While coming back from Allahabad after my SSB, I had to wait at the railway station for almost 10 hours. It takes about 10 hours to reach Delhi but on that day it took me more than twice that time. It was uncomfortable and inconvenient to wait for that train but what made it almost unbearable was the strategy of the Railways.

Instead of telling the passengers by how much time the train is delayed. They kept announcing that the train is delayed by half an hour, an hour, 45 minutes and so. If you know that the train is going to be 10 hours late, you can go check in a hotel and sleep, you can go and roam around in the city or you may do whatever you please but if you are told that the train is coming in 1 hour, you better be at the platform or you are going to miss it.
You still have to wait as long but this wait makes you very restless, tired and cranky.

I have seen a similar trend in the interactive industry. The company, for whatever reasons, will accept crazy deadlines and everyone will work like a cracked squirrels on it till they realize that the delivery is in 4 hours but what they have is not presentable. At this time the client is contacted for an extension in the deadline and in most cases client agrees to it.

Now you have more time so you can do better work. Not really. You have one more tight deadline and to keep it, you are retrofitting new ideas in what you have done earlier. You are working in increments and planning in increments and that is not the most effective way of ding something.

For example you are supposed to finish something in 4 days, you work hard but come up with something not good enough and then you get two more days. In those two mare days, all you can do is do cosmetic changes to what you have done earlier and that will have a limited effect. What you can do in 6 days is always going to better than what you can do in 4+2 days.

The question is why do we agree to do something in less time than what would be required and then deliver substandard work.
If you could read the minds of people during the presentation of such work, this is what you could hear:

“I gave these people 6 days to do something but what they have done is not up to the mark”

“You gave us only 4 days to do something and then 2 more days to revamp it, what more can you expect. You should have given us more time.”

If you see it from the perspective of the client, you had six days and not the 4+2 days as you think to do something but the results doesn't reflect that.