When not to ship software
Filed under: Development, Product Management, Project Management
When planning a product release, you always choose a date. Choosing a date is difficult, and here are some dates which I suggest you try to avoid.
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End of the Quarter
If you choose your shipping date as the last day of the quarter, your boss will tell the executive team in his next meeting. Your boss is now on the hook for delivering at the end of the quarter, whether the executives care or not.This isn’t the worst one because if you are late, you can usually get your way out of it by doing a demo to their boss. This demo, plus some nice words can usually buy you more time. The good thing about the demo is that it gives you a good wake up call of how far along you really are.
End of Fiscal Year
Never choose a date close to the end of the fiscal year. There is a chance that accounting may create forecasts of sales for what you are building. Once they make these forecasts, then it will be much more difficult to get the date modified.The end of fiscal year also causes problems due to vacations. Many companies limit vacation carry over, forcing people to burn up their vacation before year end.
Christmas
The last two weeks of December and first week of January is a bad time to try to get anything done. People have a lot going on in their lives, and are not as focused on work as they typically are. Even if your direct staff plans around the release, the accompanying staff will not. There is nothing more difficult than trying to get people around Christmas time. Also, executives will be off as well, so this will make it difficult to get sign off on a product delay.End of the Summer
People will take vacation in the summer, and even if you plan it so that each person is covered off during their vacation, it will result in pain. Shipping time is when you need all of your bench strength, and not people doing two jobs while covering someone.
In a future post I’ll try to address which date to choose.
