The Importance of Setting Realistic Deadlines

Uncomfortable truth: Most project delays are preventable. The real culprit? An unrealistic initial forecast built on hope, not data. Dates established at the beginning carry a great deal of weight. Here’s how to avoid that trap before your project even begins: A project is only as strong as its initial forecast. No amount of technology, clever methodology, or last-minute heroics can save a schedule that was doomed from the start. The key to success lies in building a rock-solid foundation—one grounded in reality, not wishful thinking. Here’s how you can get it right from day one: ✅ Commit to accuracy. Start with data, not guesswork. Use reliable historical data, performance metrics, and forecasting tools to create a realistic first forecast completion date. ✅ Align your team. A misaligned team is a recipe for disaster. Get every stakeholder on the same page about timelines, constraints, and deliverables. Shared ownership equals smoother execution. ✅ Plan for reality—not hope. Hope is not a strategy. Your schedule must reflect actual productivity rates, potential risks, and real-world constraints. The bottom line? Successful projects don't happen by accident-they're built with care, foresight, and collaboration. P.S. If this resonates with you, share ♻️ to help others avoid costly scheduling mistakes.

Had a great chat with some fellow dev veterans about the basics of production—stuff that’s often missing on projects but makes a massive difference when done right. One big gap we kept coming back to: validating estimates. Here’s the thing: individual estimates might seem fine, but over time and across teams, they’re consistently off. That’s why it’s so important to measure and track the historical patterns of estimates vs. actual outcomes. When you do that, you start to see a truth—like a team that commits to X workload but only delivers 70% of it on average. With that insight, you can adjust future plans to set realistic expectations. This approach helps nail down milestones based on reality, whether that means prioritizing scope or sticking to a fixed deadline. If scope is king, you give the date. If the date is immovable, you define what can actually get delivered. When I interview production or program management candidates, at some point I always ask how they came up with their dates. Was it handed to them, or did they calculate it? Then I follow up with how they validated those dates were realistic? This is where most candidates stumble. Many just say, "The team told me what they could do by the date," and leave it at that. The problem is, people are notoriously bad at estimating, especially for long-term tasks and honestly, if you’re just taking estimates from the devs and passing them up the chain, I find myself wondering what value you're adding to this process in the first place. Why not skip you and go straight to the devs? In this process, a large value of the producer is in the validation step—digging into whether those dates hold up under scrutiny. After all, a big part of a producer's job overall is protecting the team, even from themselves. That means taking their estimates, validating what’s possible, and being the one to push back on both the team and communicate this out to the stakeholders. Without all that, you’re headed for crunch, every time. Learning to validate dates is one of the most important level-ups for associate and mid-level producers. Having this skill and being able to articulate how you do this can be the difference between landing a job or not. Then, once you’re on the team, it’s what sets apart producers who deliver from those who don’t. Hope this helps!

"If You Seek a Different Result (No Delays), Change Your Process (Planning)!" 📅🚚 I insist on this because I’ve seen it happen too many times. A deadline is set, a project is committed, and then—bam!—delays. Not because of execution failures, but because no one planned for reality. 🎇 Diwali? Factories shut down. No production. 🎎 Local holidays? Half the workforce disappears. And still, buyers expect shipments to arrive on time. Why? Because no one warned them otherwise. Let me be real—we’ve faced delays too when we didn’t plan around this. Orders that could have been delivered in 6 weeks stretched to 10, simply because we didn’t account for festival downtime. It’s not a supplier issue. It’s a planning issue. At FRIGATE, we are trying to made this non-negotiable as a culture : ✅ Our Frigaters (suppliers) must pre-plan workloads around festival shutdowns. ✅ Our Frigatians (project team) actively track regional holidays & logistics bottlenecks. ✅ We don’t just plan production; we plan for everything that can go wrong. Because I’d rather have a realistic timeline upfront than a last-minute firefight. 👉 Missed production cycles = Delayed revenue 👉 Last-minute air freight = Lost margins 👉 Rush manufacturing = Compromised quality So I insist—plan like the real world exists. If you’re sourcing and haven’t factored in festivals, local holidays, or logistics slowdowns, 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐝𝐨𝐧’𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐚 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞. 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐚 𝐰𝐢𝐬𝐡. #ManufacturingExecution #SupplyChainPlanning #FestivalsAndLogistics #GlobalSourcing #FrigateWay #ProjectManagement

Most projects start the same way. Someone walks into my office and says: "We need this done in 3 months." Zero research. Zero analysis. Zero understanding of what "this" actually involves. Just a number pulled from thin air. After seeing this happen many times in my career, I realized... Timelines aren't predictions. They're negotiations. When someone gives you an impossible deadline, you have two choices: • Nod your head and hope for a miracle • Break down the work and give them a reality check I always choose option 2. "You want this in 3 months? Here's what 3 months gets you." "You want the full scope? Here's what that timeline looks like." The best project managers aren't the ones who say "yes" to everything. They're the ones who say, "Here's what's possible." Then, they let stakeholders decide. Your job isn't to be a magician and pull the completed project out of a hat. It's to be honest about what time actually means.