I have some friends who recently had some work done on their house to get ready to sell it. They had moved into a new home and wanted to do some upgrades before putting their prior house on the market. They did all the usual things: got some competitive bids, did reference checks, personally viewed his prior work, and I think they even validated the contractors’ insurance standing. One of them is a detective with local law enforcement, so due diligence is kind of his “thing”. The scope of work wasn’t major construction, but it was more than just some fresh paint and carpeting, so they wanted to make sure they found someone reliable to do the work for them so they could list the house quickly.
“Oh, the tile is coming in tomorrow - this place will be finished in two, three days - no worries! This is going to come together perfectly.”
Narrator: It did not.
The contractor promised them that the whole project would take two weeks and that they would be able to start about a month out. If you’ve done any home renovations, you can almost finish the story yourself, right? A month came and went, and the contractor wasn’t anywhere to be found. Then after he finally did start, it was a couple weeks later than promised and the job wasn’t finished for almost another month. In fact, it was left largely unfinished and they had to chase the contractor down to get it finished up.
Of course, my friends (the homeowners) were frustrated and upset that they couldn’t get their house listed sooner and that the work was so far away from their promised timeline. More importantly, the work that was done was of good quality. The house supposedly looked great afterwards and it didn’t appear the contractor cut any corners. In essence they got the exact results they wanted, it just took substantially more heartache and frustration to get them than they wanted to go through.
So - what do we take away from this? The “contractor delay” is so common that it’s become cliché to say that any home renovation will take twice as long as you expect and cost twice as much. We’ve almost come to just assume that the contractor will promise it faster than it could ever possibly be delivered. “If I ran this company,” we say to ourselves, “I would never promise a customer something I couldn’t deliver.” And then we turn back to our email, see a message from our boss who needs something done, and we commit to having it done ASAP or tomorrow or something, giving almost no thought to if we can actually do it that fast.
Ahh, yes – the hypocrisy of office life, amirite? We know exactly how frustrating it is to be promised something that isn’t (and possibly never could be) delivered on-time or on-budget, and then we turn around and commit the exact same mistake in our day jobs forgetting that in almost every respect the people asking for something are our customers. If we were independent contractors, we’d even call them customers or clients. Yet because we’re “colleagues” or “coworkers,” we never stop to think if we’re promising more than we can reasonably deliver.
I’m not asking you to underestimate the time it takes to complete a task - I’m just saying don’t intentionally overestimate it.
Lots of people say that they believe in “under promise and over deliver.” I used to be a big believer in this method, and it’s awfully hard for me to knock it because I have used it to some substantial effect throughout my career. However, I’ve recently come to believe that in its own way it may be just as frustrating and dishonest in the long run. For those of you unfamiliar with the phrase or concept of under promising, it means to say that a project will take longer than you think it will and cost more than you think it will to lower the requestor’s expectations. Then you have the opportunity to deliver ahead of schedule and possibly even under budget - making you look really good.
The problem with the “under promise, over deliver” scenario is that while you may look really good – you didn’t actually provide additional value, you just did what was asked of you and were able to complete it under artificially lax constraints. The risk here is that if you do this repeatedly, people will start to expect that you can do things much faster than you say you can. Virtually every seasoned professional automatically calibrates to this kind of game very quickly; in the end you may say something will take you two weeks, but they’ll expect it in one week. So ultimately, you’re both just agreeing to a weird arrangement where you puff up the needs to get work done, and they mentally discount what you say. This may be fine for small projects, but when you start talking about projects with multiple zeros on the end that take months to deliver this can cause budgetary and scheduling problems, especially if you’re trying to work in a highly coordinated environment. And look at it this way, if you get in the habit of saying that something that will take 3 days will take a week, and everyone knows that about you and mentally deducts 40% of the schedule to padding, when you say a project will take two months, and you lose something like 20 days of that because everyone assumes you’re padding – that’s going to hurt.
Ohhh.. “How Flour is Made.” That’s way better than doing this project. Let’s watch that.
The other reason that I have grown to dislike this process is that I don’t think I’m alone when I admit that I am guilty of taking my foot off the gas when I feel like I have more time than necessary to complete a project. If I have an extra week of time to complete something, I’m far more likely to see what’s new on YouTube than I otherwise would be if I had to keep myself focused to hit a realistic but manageable goal. I’ve found that the biggest enemy to effective and productive time management is a wide-open calendar. I can use this past weekend as an example. I found my weekend to be unusually bereft of plans, commitments, or tasks. In fact, when I woke up on Saturday morning, the only thing I needed to do all weekend was to install a new toilet seat in our kids’ bathroom. I was in no rush because I had two days of whitespace to make it happen. It is currently 10:00 PM on Sunday and that toilet seat is still leaning on the wall, wondering when it will be installed.
If I had instead said that I would install the toilet seat by noon on Saturday, my wife would have had that expectation and I would have gotten it done. Instead, I let the whitespace let me be lazier than I should have been. The exact same thing happens when I have too much time to complete a project at work – I just don’t push as hard as I could, and it starts to slip.
So where does that leave us? I think I have a better option than “under promise and over deliver,” especially for those of us in IT: set a realistic timeline and budget and then think through all of the things that could go wrong or mess you up on the way to completion. Think through how likely any of them are, and then provide a range to your customer. Communicating something like, “I will most likely complete in two weeks, but there’s a 20% chance it could take about two days” is a lot more detailed and shows more thoughtfulness than saying “it will take two weeks.”
As we’ve talked about often on this blog, working in technology is about communication with your stakeholders. Imagine if the contractor we talked about above had been more detailed to my friends before they signed a contract to work on their house. What if he had said, “I can probably start in three weeks, but there’s a 50% chance that gets pushed out two weeks because of the weather. Once I start, I expect it will take a month and a half. It may take a bit longer if the plumber I subcontract with is booked out.” I’m pretty sure they would have gone into the project more prepared for delays, and would have been more forgiving when they did creep up.
Remember that in most cases our customers do not fully understand the complexities of the systems we work on – so they are not likely in a position to debate your estimates, just like you are unlikely to be able to debate how long it will take to redo your bathroom or kitchen with a contractor. Don’t abuse that perspective or insight. It will ultimately erode trust in your expertise and the authority of your opinion, and if you lose that you will struggle to be recognized as a standout in your company. As I’ve said before, the key differentiator between being a technology leader and a back-office tech isn’t in your technical skill, it’s in your communication and interpersonal skills and being able to clearly set expectations around effort and budget required is a key piece of those skills.
Making sure you clearly communicate timelines and expectations not only protects your own time, it communicates that you respect the time (and timelines) of your customer as well.
Questions for reflection:
When is the last time you under promised results or timeline? Did you get credit for getting it done early or were they “on to you”?
Do you ever start to slip into neutral if you have too much time to get a project done? How do you combat that?
Do you feel like you have the relational capital with your manager or other stakeholders to give them an honest range of how long a project will take? If not, can you build it?