Remove Date-driven Behavior to Achieve Agility — An Introduction

Date-driven behavior undermines Agility.

Dates are not evil, but the behavior around them often is detrimental to achieving agility.

In most cases, the misperception around dates is that they motivate teams to focus and deliver. In fact, driving a team to a deadline has the opposite effect and often leads to sub-par solutions, unhappy users, and unhappy teams.

Ask yourself the following questions about dates before reading this post:

• How often do you hit the dates you set?
• Does quality suffer if you struggle to hit a predetermined date?
• Does blaming ever surround missed dates?
• Is employee performance influenced by missing a date?
• Do you learn more by planning or doing? Which is encouraged by the presence of a predetermined delivery date?
• Is software development complex? Uncertain? Custom? Creative?
• When do you know the least in a software development effort? At the beginning? Is that normally when the delivery date is set?
• Do dates make change easier or harder?
• Is a sustainable pace supported by dates?