Deadlines are the reality of any business. Reputations can be built or lost on meeting or failing to meet critical deadlines, regardless of the quality of your product or service. A deadline is a serious commitment.
No matter how big or small the project it is important at the outset to understand your customer's deadlines and how your contribution fits into their overall plans. Your contribution may be a small thing but it can be the critical thing that enables your customer to meet their commitments. Failure to meet deadlines can have a significant financial impact not only on your own business, but on your customer's business.
There are some customers who "always need things urgently" - when those timeframes are unrealistic because they do not understand the amount of work involved to meet the commitment it is best to be upfront about what is achievable within their timeframe. Some customers overstate their urgency, yet the task priority in their overall schedule is actually a low priority. I have come across situations where customers have needed things urgently, have rearranged schedules and worked late nights to meet the customer's timeframe only to discover that it is only weeks later that the customer actually downloads the images. To understand the customer's urgency it is also necessary to understand how mission critical it is to deliver the product or service within those negotiated deadlines and what impact that would have on your customer if the deadline is not met or negotiated to a more realistic timeframe.
When negotiating deadlines, it is also important to have a clear understanding of what you value to uphold in the delivery of your product or service. Or to put it in another way, what are you willing to compromise in order to meet your customers' deadlines? I think there is a small sweet spot between time and quality delivery. If it is going to take you a long time to deliver a service or product to a customer then service or product had better ooze with quality and excellence. If you are going to consistently meet fast turnaround times, then either you better have fail proof and well organised systems in place, or be prepared to take short cuts along the way.
One of the killer phrases in any service oriented business is ASAP. There are a lot of hidden assumptions and expectations in ASAP and more often than not your customer's definition of ASAP may be very different to your definition of ASAP. Unless your customer has a good knowledge of what is currently on your plate or has a in depth respect for or interest in what is on your plate (all scenarios highly unlikely), your priority and urgency to meet their expectations in the most part will miss the mark. It is not unrealistic to expect that a customer will assume that they are your first priority over and above other customers. It is better to have the discussion that moves away from some vague ASAP to very specific timeframes and mutually agreed commitments.
When negotiating deadlines it is important to be aware of the phenomenon known as the planning fallacy. It is suggested that regardless of experience or knowledge about a task, we have a tendency to underestimate the time it will actually take to perform a task with a bias for optimism, where as an outsider would overestimate the time needed with a pessimistic bias. According to this definition, the planning fallacy results in not only time overruns, but also cost overruns and benefit shortfalls. Bill Gates is quoted as saying "Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years." This view is reinforced by a procrastination researcher, Timothy Pychyl who found that people tend to overestimate how long it will take to complete short tasks and underestimate the time longer projects will take—in other words, the planning fallacy. (By the way with all that procrastination, I wonder how Timothy gets any research done!)
To set realistic deadlines, it is important to understand how much you actually do get done in short periods of time (say 10 minutes). The second key advice commonly stated is to build in a fudge factor of between 25% to 50% of time required to complete a project. Plan for the unexpected - take into account that you may have a low energy day, or another project, or unforeseen problems with the project you are working on. The third piece of advice is that if you want to build a reputation of quality customer service and on-time delivery, then do yourself a favour and negotiate deadlines that are not going to flatline you with stress or fatigue before you reach the deadline, and consistently meet your deadlines with confidence.
Flying Solo Tip 070365 : Manage your deadlines to manage your reputation.