The Deadline That Was Never Agreed At All

The three ways a date becomes imaginary

Derived rather than asked. The schedule needs the drawing back by the 14th, so the 14th goes in the plan. Nobody has asked the client whether the 14th is possible, and the client's drawing approvals normally take a fortnight.

Told to the wrong person. The date was communicated, to somebody who is not involved in producing the thing. A sales contact, a project coordinator, a general mailbox. It was received politely and went nowhere.

Contradicted in writing and not read. The supplier quoted twenty working days in the quotation everybody has a copy of. The plan says twelve, because twelve is what the plan needed. Both numbers have been in the file for a month.

The third one is the most common

It is also the most uncomfortable, because the information was present and was not absorbed.

Lead times in quotations are read at the moment of comparing prices and not afterwards. The number that survives into the schedule is the one somebody wanted, and the reconciliation never happens because the two numbers live in different documents owned by different people.

The check is mechanical and takes a few minutes: for every date in the plan that depends on an outside party, find the document where that party stated their own lead time, and compare. Any row where the plan is shorter is a row that is going to slip.

Making a date real

A date is real when the party who has to meet it has seen it, in writing, and has said yes.

That is a low bar and most dates do not clear it. The form that clears it is short:

To keep this on track I need the signed drawing by 14:00 UTC on Friday 13 March. Can you confirm that works, or tell me the earliest you can do?

Three outcomes, all useful. They confirm, and the date is now real. They give a different date, which is better news now than in three weeks. Or they do not answer, which is itself information and is the one case where escalation is justified.

What to do when the real date is worse

The reflex is to keep pushing until the number improves. It rarely does, and the cost of trying is that the counterparty stops giving honest numbers and starts giving numbers calculated to end the conversation.

The more useful move is to take the real date and go and look at what else in the plan can absorb it. Usually something can: a step that was sequential for no reason, a leg with slack in it, a decision that can be taken on a sample rather than the final article.

That work is only possible if the real date is known early, which is the entire argument for asking rather than assuming.

The dates worth checking first

Not all of them need this treatment. The ones that do have a common shape.

• Any date on the critical path that depends on somebody outside your organisation.
• Any date that was in the plan before the counterparty was chosen.
• Any date that has been in the plan unchanged for more than a month.
• Any date nobody can remember agreeing.

The last one is the strongest signal. If nobody in the room can say who agreed a date and when, it was derived, and derived dates are met roughly as often as chance allows.

Marking which is which

A plan containing both real and derived dates, with no way of telling them apart, is harder to work with than one containing only derived ones, because the confidence is uniform and false.

The cheapest remedy is one column. Against each date, who agreed it and when — or, where nobody did, a blank.

The fourth row is now visibly different from the others, and the difference is actionable: somebody can go and make it real, or the plan can stop depending on it.

Most plans, run through this exercise for the first time, come out about half blank.