Over and Under

Once I had a colleague who loved the project management philosophy “under-promise and over-deliver”. The idea is we will delight our customers and stakeholders by delivering more than expected. Right?

What if a patient went in for a heart bypass surgery. When they awaken, the surgeon says “Good news! We did two bypasses!” Should the patient be happy they got a two-for-one-bypass? Or should they be concerned that there were extra complications?

Software development is the execution of a set of procedures which are deeply tied to the customer’s well-being in complicated ways. Padding a project with extra features and driving a team to “over deliver” on a product is not, actually, guaranteed to make the customer any better off than having more surgery is guaranteed to be good for a patient.

While software development isn’t life-threatening surgery, the metaphor is useful to highlight some things that we overlook if we think of software only as a product (and that more product is always better):

• Changes come with hidden costs. All changes can lead to increased maintenance, support, training, higher server requirements, and so on. These long-term costs can easily outweigh any short-term delight in new features.
• Timing Matters. Racing to implement new features ahead of schedule or, worse, purposefully over-estimating to get an easier schedule to beat, ignores the fact that delivery has to be carefully timed for testing, user acceptance, deployment, training, support and so on. Trying to coordinate all of this with the team and the stakeholders while on a hidden schedule is just bad planning.
• Trust comes from doing what you say. Over delivering means delivering unexpected new features or working on a schedule not approved by the stakeholders. How is doing anything not approved by the stakeholders really better?

In short, I think that over delivering is just as bad as under delivering. Our goal should always be to deliver the feature sets we defined with all stakeholders on the schedule agreed upon. Honest communication about what is expected and when it will be delivered is the only way a project can succeed. When the pressure is on to “just do more than expected” we need to keep in mind that over shooting and under shooting both miss the target.