How to tell management a deadline is impossible
Ambitious internal deadlines often fail because teams do not understand the real logistics required to achieve them. Simply being apologetic is ineffective, so framing the delay around the impossibility of the deadline and gathering supporting evidence helps communicate the issue to management.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
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- 1Communicate well before the deadline when realizing it cannot be metDid this help you?
- 2Provide regular progress updates and evidence supporting why a deadline is unrealisticDid this help you?
- 3Frame the response around lessons learned rather than defending innocenceDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I’ve had terrible teams set ambitious deadlines because they didn’t understand the logistics required to actually achieve that deadline and then blamed the staff.”source ↗
“I've been apologetic in the past and didn't find much success. Most recently, I've been framing it around the deadline being absolutely impossible and gathering as much evidence as I can to support that.”source ↗
Where this came up
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