This blog post explores the gap between relative prioritization of tasks vs relying on a fixed-due date-approach.
Remember the good old times? Where everything was so start-up, no need for big meetings or todo lists, things just got done. But then over time the number of customers expands, and so our headcount increases, which introduces a weird new challenge: How many people you can realistically keep up with.
This challenge actually relates to the concept where the bigger the number of people is, the less can be known about each individual. Within this concept there are actual thresholds, a.k.a. milestones that happen at group sizes of about 10, 25, 50, 100, respectively.
The reasons why we stop knowing everybody around us and why that matters is directly linked to how successfully a company can grow and evolve.
There are a number of cognitive reasons for this, and if you want to read up on it then check out Dunbar’s law here.
From the people perspective it starts with not being acquainted with the intricacies of everyone’s private life anymore, to the point where we don’t even know everybody’s names or even their faces.
So if you don’t know who you’re working with and you don’t have the luxury of pulling all-nighters like in the old days – how do you keep things honest?
Going back to the trajectory of organizational growth we come to a point when and where we decide to become more professional – usually matching the cognitive group size thresholds!
So we hire grownup people to introduce processes and tools, we add a middle management with teamleads, we develop documentation and standards, and now that we finally have all this we have solved the problem, right?
Well no. Because interactions across complex systems carry risks – particularly when it comes to getting things done.
The Classical Approach: Fixed Due Date Planning
The most visible result of becoming professional are usually Open Issue Lists (or OIL), containing columns for task owner and due dates.
When can we have this report? By Friday.
Transparency is probably the sexiest thing after productivity.
So due dates are obviously set, but what happens behind the curtain? What information is factored in? Here are some of the highlights:
- Currently perceived job size/effort guesstimate
- Current risk assessment and safety buffer; extent depending on personal experiences vs.
- Impact of not making the deadline
- Current work load
So upon setting the due date, we use current information to give a projection.
But that’d be too easy, because even though it might be accurate, its worthless without including a footnote “Due date is valid until…”. That might sound super cynical, but for organizations not large enough to have internal SLAs – real life can get messy.
Assuming that every task becomes a contract, the due date approach can work. So let’s look at some of the pros and cons of the due date-approach!
Advantages
The biggest advantage of this approach is that virtually all team members know how to work with due dates, which makes it very easy to introduce and teach. We don’t need high levels of trust or commitment, just a very simple Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) “Work on tasks with due date ≤ today!”
Therefore, this approach is especially suitable for teams with lower levels of maturity, such as newly formed or rapidly growing groups, as it provides a really simple work principle.
Disadvantages
First and foremost, working with due dates leads to multitasking, which introduces short term inefficiencies because of the associated switching costs.
In the long term, multitasking also massively increases lead times (see Little’s Law) which is deeply problematic when you have finite resources and when you consider how time works.
When talking lead time in context of limited resources, this dynamic leads to overtime, which leads to risk of burnout, and when you end up with -1 head count, everything gets worse for everyone else! It’s worth checking out Henrik Kniberg’s awesome keynote on the topic of focus.
This approach to structure chaos is actually a symptom of a lack of trust.
But why has trust suddenly been eroded? The truth is that it hasn’t, but with every social threshold that is reached the knowledge of the individual is reduced. Processes and rules are meant to help mitigate the trust issue so that we can get stuff done – but that then adds a new challenge: quality…
So we come up with rules to replace the trust, interaction and communication we used to have – but at the same time we use a planning approach selected for its simplicity. Pairing no qualitative requirements with hard deadlines leads to lower levels of commitment, which will eventually collide with corporate or personal values. Cognitive dissonance at its finest, no?
Finally, never underestimate the sneakiness of others. Due dates can be risky when some of our team members are good at math because they’ll quickly figure out that a due date “7 days from now” means “a duration of 5 days” (= 7 minus weekend). Hic sunt dracones. From duration it is just a thin red line before team members might start to confuse it with effort, at which point you’re on the verge of anarchy.
So the end result is that we trap ourselves in an undergrowth filled with barbed wire, with more and more tasks with more and more due dates, which leads to even less commitment. Less commitment by the individual increases pressure on the rest of the team to play even harder, until they give up one by one. Play hard becomes plan hard, and all we end up doing is juggling tasks, finding excuses, and dodging bullets. We sacrifice our ability to dynamically react to change, and overextending our reach we can only win by generating failure demand. All the while we march towards burnout.
An Alternative Approach – Relative Prioritization
Ok, so given all the disadvantages of the classical approach, my proposal is to replace due dates with relative priorities. It would be naïve to avoid due dates, they’re an operational reality, but we use context to figure out the overall urgencies.
We rank task A higher than B. We rank task B higher than C. Therefore, we focus on task A first.
Just like in the Agile Manifesto, this does not imply that lower-ranked tasks have no value to us. The semantics is that, given all information we currently have available, we can rank some tasks higher than others – and those without urgency should still be ranked so they don’t get missed off.
The ranking itself can use any number of different metrics, for example WSJF (which factors in risk, delay and job size), customer value or even Eisenhower’s prioritization matrix.
To make this approach feasible, our working assumption is that we can make the relative priority of tasks transparent to others. Also, we need a permanent feedback mechanism regarding the work in progress, aka the tasks currently being worked on. Both can be accomplished with a Kanban board.
Advantages
Imagine you work in a warehouse, containing crates 6 feet high. You have a map of the warehouse, showing the exact positions of all crates (this is your project plan). In this scenario, if you said that makes sense to “stick to the plan, no matter what”, then snap!
However, in my experience, the reality is closer to this:
The same warehouse, again with crates 6 feet in height. However, this time, it is pitch black although there is a map of the warehouse where all the crates were put to begin with. But, the crates are continuously being moved around and the only way to figure out what’s what is to inspect and adapt. In a pitch black room.
No plan survives contact with the enemy.
Helmuth von Moltke
By responding to the change, we get rid of multitasking. We even might find focus and flow in our daily work.
Disadvantages
One of the disadvantages of this approach is that it requires higher maturity levels in the organization. For example, a basic understanding of Agile Methods and Kanban is needed.
Teams need a certain degree of discipline to successfully use a no-due-date-approach (I appreciate how incredibly German that sounds). Getting rid of due dates might lead to a kind of anxiety for the team members. Without due dates externally imposed on us, we are suddenly responsible for organizing our own work, which is in and out of itself a challenge.
Using deadlines meant to freeze a certain status quo, taking that away is like turning off gravity. We worked on a task and obeyed the deadline, no matter if reality changed or not. We ignored all new information – life was simpler then. Using the relative priotization method, we will never again risk working on tasks which are unimportant or low value.
If you’ve made it this far then congratulations! The best way to try and summarize all this is with a side-by-side comparison of both of the approaches:
| Fixed Due Date Approach | Relative Prioritization | |
| Maturity Level Required | Low | Medium |
| Ranking by | Ascending Due Date | Value/WSJF/Eisenhower Matrix |
| Enables Forecasting | Yes | Yes |
| Considers Individual/Team Capacity | Yes, at time of commitment | Yes, dynamically |
| Feedback Channel | Open Issue Lists | One-Dimensional Backlog or Kanban |
| Dynamic and Continuous Update | No, static | Yes, all new information utilized |