Why Is It So Hard to Provide Reliable Completion Dates?

Have you ever had trouble forecasting the completion date for a project or major deliverable?

Even if the team structure and process were appropriate, the workload was reasonable, everyone defined “completion” the same way, and there was a culture of honesty and transparency?

A key reason for this common difficulty is that the system of value delivery is not stable.

Systems turn demand (backlog items) into supply (deliverables). In an unstable system, there’s too much variation in the time, quality, and cost of doing that, and too many problems that the system isn’t designed to handle.

Leaders often don’t realize that system stability is a thing, and that theirs is not stable. That’s easy to miss: teams work hard and follow plans, deliveries do happen, and the company remains in business.

If you need to provide completion dates, you must first stabilize your system. 100% predictability is impossible and there will always be normal fluctuations (“noise”), but at least you’ll be able to provide forecasts with acceptable confidence.

Here are principles and tactics I use for stabilizing value delivery systems. Many of them come from Kanban and Agile methods, although they’re also useful for more plan-driven methods.

Visualize the work (that’s the first thing I do)
Define explicit intake and completion standards
Cultivate learner safety (without this, people’s actions are likely to result in a high level of rework)
Increase the intrinsic quality of the product and the team’s artifacts
Break work down into smaller meaningful pieces
Get to “done” (always finish what’s started); manage impediments and blockers
Reduce bottlenecks
Constrain work intake (e.g. with time-boxes and WIP limits)
Turn as much unplanned work into planned work as possible
Determine how to handle the rest of unplanned work
Keep spare capacity for dealing with unplanned work while maintaining a sustainable pace
Manage high-variability delays
Collect relevant metrics and visualize them
Enable people to contribute outside narrow specialties

Most of these system-management activities, whether proactive or reactive, don’t require concentrated effort and time. However, they do require leaders’ ongoing intention and attention, because their effect is not immediate.