Even on the Web, Deadlines Matter
My dad was a newspaper reporter. He started in the days of lead type
and paste pots in the middle of the last century, and finally came to
his senses
and started a real business after filing his last few Presidential
press
stories in the 1970s. Along the way, he
was nominated for a Pulitzer prize and lots of other honors, and his
folksy, matter-of-fact style of reporting was responsible for
the demise of perhaps a dozen political careers.
The big thing with my dad was deadlines. He believed in getting up early, working tenaciously, following hunches, researching aggressively. He would then tinker with and rewrite a story to perfect it -- but he stopped tinkering when the deadline approached. When he was political columnist at the Tallahassee (Florida) Democrat, then an afternoon paper, the absolute deadline was something like 11 AM. When he reported for the Orlando Sentinel, a morning paper, the deadline was something like 7 at night. Everywhere he worked had deadlines, and reporters took them seriously: If they didn't make the deadline, the story would miss its edit and press run, and it wouldn't show up in the next edition of the paper. Funny thing how deadlines work. I bet he and his fellow cub reporters didn't miss a deadline more than once.
Simple times: My dad, Jim Hardee (right), and me. Not on deadline.
Years later, I was a news reporter in radio. You might have heard me on NPR, or at WAPE up and down the US Atlantic coast. Lots of deadlines, there too, and every hour a new set. If a story didn't make the 5 PM newscast, there was one at 6 PM, but probably not before.
Fast forward to today and my wife, who is a TV news Executive Producer at network O&O. You would think that in this modern age, TV would be less constrained than newspapers: After all, there are no presses or ink or paper to deliver in TV, only electrons. And they have satellites, live trucks, and lots of fancy equipment. But even in the much more modern and immediate world of electronic news, there are deadlines too. If you miss your slot, or submit an incomplete story package, or put something into the wrong format, or it's too long, you're in trouble: You either won't get on the air or you will create a mess live for everyone to see. The truth is, even in "immediate" worlds such as broadcasting, some amount of prep time and standards are essential to putting on a good show.
So what about the web?
People expect everything about the web to more instant than even cable news TV; After all, I can write a short blog entry and post it in a minute, and it will be there for all the Internet. I can stream video live from an event and it will be as immediate as a live shot on CNN. For web teams in every company, this creates a huge problem of expectations. Their constituents want the immediacy of cable news, but with the polish and grandeur of a Spielberg epic. It's a problem, because the two things are contradictory.
Unfortunately, it's not unheard of -- even in the middle of a complex and choreographed launch -- for our team to get an email out of the blue at 2 AM containing a hairball zip file of HTML and JPEGs destined for some minor outpost of one of our web sites but of course urgent to the owners of said content. Now, the content providers will of course have totally missed their deadlines of the day before, and aren't even be part of the official launch sequence, but will sit by their phones anxiously anticipating that we will somehow sort everything out, and get their stuff posted with fancy production values a few hours later (like, say, 5 AM). Honest, this stuff really happens. Then the web team, being addicted to adrenaline and good deeds, actually manages to get the content posted, which sets an unfortunate precedent.
These kinds of little "emergencies" due to missed deadlines are more frequent than any of us in the web biz would like. But here are some of the problems created by poor planning and missed deadlines. If you are a customer of a web team in your company, take them to heart:
Yep, even on the web, deadlines matter.
Tunes: Elton John: Pinball Wizard
The big thing with my dad was deadlines. He believed in getting up early, working tenaciously, following hunches, researching aggressively. He would then tinker with and rewrite a story to perfect it -- but he stopped tinkering when the deadline approached. When he was political columnist at the Tallahassee (Florida) Democrat, then an afternoon paper, the absolute deadline was something like 11 AM. When he reported for the Orlando Sentinel, a morning paper, the deadline was something like 7 at night. Everywhere he worked had deadlines, and reporters took them seriously: If they didn't make the deadline, the story would miss its edit and press run, and it wouldn't show up in the next edition of the paper. Funny thing how deadlines work. I bet he and his fellow cub reporters didn't miss a deadline more than once.
Simple times: My dad, Jim Hardee (right), and me. Not on deadline.
Years later, I was a news reporter in radio. You might have heard me on NPR, or at WAPE up and down the US Atlantic coast. Lots of deadlines, there too, and every hour a new set. If a story didn't make the 5 PM newscast, there was one at 6 PM, but probably not before.
Fast forward to today and my wife, who is a TV news Executive Producer at network O&O. You would think that in this modern age, TV would be less constrained than newspapers: After all, there are no presses or ink or paper to deliver in TV, only electrons. And they have satellites, live trucks, and lots of fancy equipment. But even in the much more modern and immediate world of electronic news, there are deadlines too. If you miss your slot, or submit an incomplete story package, or put something into the wrong format, or it's too long, you're in trouble: You either won't get on the air or you will create a mess live for everyone to see. The truth is, even in "immediate" worlds such as broadcasting, some amount of prep time and standards are essential to putting on a good show.
So what about the web?
People expect everything about the web to more instant than even cable news TV; After all, I can write a short blog entry and post it in a minute, and it will be there for all the Internet. I can stream video live from an event and it will be as immediate as a live shot on CNN. For web teams in every company, this creates a huge problem of expectations. Their constituents want the immediacy of cable news, but with the polish and grandeur of a Spielberg epic. It's a problem, because the two things are contradictory.
Unfortunately, it's not unheard of -- even in the middle of a complex and choreographed launch -- for our team to get an email out of the blue at 2 AM containing a hairball zip file of HTML and JPEGs destined for some minor outpost of one of our web sites but of course urgent to the owners of said content. Now, the content providers will of course have totally missed their deadlines of the day before, and aren't even be part of the official launch sequence, but will sit by their phones anxiously anticipating that we will somehow sort everything out, and get their stuff posted with fancy production values a few hours later (like, say, 5 AM). Honest, this stuff really happens. Then the web team, being addicted to adrenaline and good deeds, actually manages to get the content posted, which sets an unfortunate precedent.
These kinds of little "emergencies" due to missed deadlines are more frequent than any of us in the web biz would like. But here are some of the problems created by poor planning and missed deadlines. If you are a customer of a web team in your company, take them to heart:
- Missed deadlines put the quality of your project at risk, because
your final production is handled by exception. Many errors are known to
occur from last-minute rushing around.
- Missed deadlines mean that your project also puts others at high
risk,
because your web team is probably already juggling other big, complex
projects that don't benefit from extra distractions that you're
injecting into the situation.
- Missed deadlines remove the ability for your company's web team to respond to real emergencies that come up, like major company announcements, breaking news, natural disasters (yes, these happen and your teams have plans for them), or last minute product updates or promotions.
- Missed deadlines on your part steal time from other big projects, since your web team has to scramble for your emergency when they should be, say, working on a CSS update for a big web application that is launching next week
- Web teams need sleep, too: If you trap them onto a hamster wheel of constant emergencies due to poor planning, they won't do quality work for you because they will be toiling bleary eyed under constant sleep debt.
Yep, even on the web, deadlines matter.
Tunes: Elton John: Pinball Wizard
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