No deadlines
Scrum works for cross-functional teams of specialists that only work on one thing at a time and have everything they need within the team to complete the work.
Scrum has the #NoEstimates movement that says slicing work small enough enables teams to incrementally deliver value without requiring any kind of estimation.
But Scrum doesn’t work for multi-functional teams of generalists that work on lots of different things at the same time and have to work with other parts of the business to accomplish their goals.
I’d like to propose #NoDeadlines for modern agile teams not using Scrum and working in ways that mean the work they are doing requires collaboration with other people and teams who also have other work and different priorities, and which is often out of the teams control.
#NoDeadlines recognises that it’s impossible to accurately predict when work will be completed if it is dependent on people that aren’t part of the core team doing the work. The more people and teams involved, and the more things those teams are working on, the more impossible it becomes to accurately predict when any piece of work will be completed.
Commitment to deadlines should only be made if everything that is required to meet that deadline is within the control of the person making the commitment. If any element of the work requires input from someone who isn’t part of the team doing the work, isn’t asked to commit to the same deadline, has other priorities, works to a different schedule, or suffers no consequences from not meeting the deadline, then deadlines should not be set.
Deadlines set in these kinds of situations are at best completely arbitrary and at worst pure fantasy. Communicating fantasy deadlines to other parts of the business undermine the team when those deadlines aren’t achieved because the team needed input from other people who weren’t committed to the work in the same way.
Not setting deadlines takes the pressure off of teams from chasing unrealistic fantasy deadlines that they don’t have control over and provides psychological safety to experiment rapidly and focus on delivering value to the customers when that value is ready.