Deadlines

Tim Brown of IDEO has written a great book - Change By Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovations (2009). My suggestion would be to make this mandatory reading for all engineers. Brown has some very good thoughts in his chapter on constraints - "The willing and even enthusiastic acceptance of competing constraints is the foundation of design thinking." Brown points out - "Constraints can best be visualized in terms of three overlapping criteria for successful ideas: feasibility (what is functionally possible within the foreseeable future); viability (what is likely to become part of a sustainable business model); and desirability (what make sense to people and for people).

We all have deadlines - Brown discusses the role of deadlines as a tool:

Though we all have deadlines all of the time, in the divergent and exploratory phase of design thinking, deadlines take on an extra level of importance. They refer to the process and not the people. The deadline is the fixed point on the horizon where everything stops and the final evaluation begins, These points may seem arbitrary and unwelcome, but an experienced project leader knows how to use them to turn options into decisions. It's unwise to have a deadline every day, at least in the earlier phrases of a project. Nor does it work to stretch it out six months. It takes judgement to determine when a team will reach a point where management input, reflection, redirection, and selection are most likely to be valuable.

I have not yet met a client who says, "Take all the time you need." All project work is bound by limits: limits of technology, limits of skill, limits of knowledge. But the calendar is probably the most insistent limit of them all because it brings us back to the bottom line. As Ben Franklin, America's first and most adventurous real design thinker, pointed out in a letter to a young tradesman, "Time is money."