Deadlines

Deadlines are an artificial construct. This sentence is my take-home from the Analysis of Business Problems (ABP) class. Deadlines are very important in our personal and business lives. Deadlines help us prioritise our activities and set the necessary expectations. However, deadlines can be unrealistic, especially when padded with urgency. Except for a life-and-death situation, urgency can be said to be overrated most of the time. When you drill down on things classified as urgent with an unrealistic deadline, you will realise that there was enough time to get things done but someone dropped the ball at some point.

When making a decision, personally or professionally, data and time are two of the most important factors. Data, either qualitative or quantitative, is what you need to make a logical decision, while you need time to go through all the data, ask the right questions, and get more data before concluding. Data without time for proper analysis, as well as time without any data to analyse, are a waste.
If there is an unrealistic deadline for business analysis, the best thing to do is to voice your concerns and possibly withdraw from the analysis. As our guest facilitator said, another opportunity will always come up.

When house hunting in Lagos, you have agents tell you to quickly pay up when they see you have interest in any property you have been shown. They try to put pressure on you by claiming a thousand and one people are interested in the same property and will pay for it immediately. For the most part, they are right because there is great demand for accommodation in Lagos. The fear caused by deadlines make a lot of people pay up without doing their due diligence. In this case, due diligence will include speaking to the potential neighbours about security, flooding, hours of power supply, clean water, access to work and other places of interest, traffic situations, access to medical facilities, and so on. However, as Lagosians, we just want a nice place that meets the smallest of our requirements, especially if the search has been going on for a while.

This applies to our professional lives as well. We hardly push back on set deadlines; we just want to get the task over with. Some people might be able to get a lot done in the time frame, while others will just do the bare minimum. If the quality of work done will be affected by a deadline, please push it back. However, by pushing back, we may not always get positive feedback. I have been in a situation with an unrealistic deadline set for an analysis and presentation. I voiced my concern, but the situation was more of a draconian decree, which speaks more to the leadership style. I had to make the best of the situation and put together my documentation using the little time I had and the information I had.

There will always be deadlines, but the quality of our analysis should be prioritised.