“When will the project complete?”
I hate this question and I bet you do too. If it’s some document or presentation you need to create – that is simple enough. Take whatever you are comfortable with and add 20-30% on top of whatever you were going to say. If you need to work harder or longer you can put in the extra days/hours to get it done.
If you are speaking for a team, don’t you dare. Your answer should be something along the lines of “I’ll need to consult with the team.” Whether you consult with the team, forget you had the conversation, punt forever – fine. Just don’t give a date.
They will try to pin you down. They will tell you how important it is for the organization to have an estimate. They need to make their go to market plans. Sales needs to prepare. Other teams are relying on this information.
They aren’t wrong.
So what do you do? How can you protect the team from other people’s unreasonable expectations? How could you possibly commit to some arbitrary point on a calendar with the limited information and massive risks ahead?
Oddly, there is an answer to this problem. Say an operational quarter.
Instead of “October” you say “Q4″. If your project rides the cusp of 2 quarters like March, you can give my all-time favorite response – “We are targeting the Q1/Q2 timeframe”.
Quarters provide a ton of extra room while still somehow sounding professional. They are kind of magical. They even let people imagine their own answers. When I say “Q3” I mean the very last day of September. I’m fine having them think the first of July.
Its a lot like how the human brain can’t fully process that $3.99 is the same as $4.00. No one seems to challenge that you’ve given everything you do at least a two month buffer by using the quarter approach. Nobody’s lied or even misled. Everyone just hears what they want. Now you and your team can go back to the work of delivering.
Fun fact – When you wind up missing your deadline, blowing right through the entire quarter, you can say things like “We originally had an aggressive Q3 target, and are happy to say we are very confident of a Q4 delivery. Sure sounds a lot better than “We were targeting somewhere between July and September, but looks like December now.”
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Editors note 2/4/2024
I originally wrote this a few years after I learned the beauty of using quarters, but I fear this advice is now just industry standard. Well – if you didn’t know, you are welcome. If I wasted your time on this one – whoops.