Digital and the Death of the Deadline

Mark Gash investigates where it all went wrong.

Deadline - funny word, isn’t it? The Oxford definition is “a point in time by which something must be done”, which hints at there being consequences for not doing that thing by the specified point in time. Those consequences will vary depending on circumstances, but generally, they will be bad.

Historically, a dead-line was a boundary line around a prison, beyond which a prisoner could go only at the risk of being shot by a guard. So, a line that, if crossed, would result in your death. It’s a shame that this literal meaning no longer applies - it might make us all more aware of our timekeeping.

My exposure to deadlines started with my first real job at The Press Association, where, as a Sub-Editor, I wrote TV listings, prepped celebrity photographs and made up horoscopes (yeah, don’t believe those things, folks) for a range of national newspapers and magazines. And I had lots of deadlines. If I missed those deadlines, then the newspaper went to press with a blank space where the Home and Away episode synopsis should have been, Jennifer Lopez would be poorly lit, and Sagittarians wouldn’t know to buy a lottery ticket. All of this would result in me receiving a bollocking from above because there was no way to go back and correct my sloppy approach to time management.

Once that deadline was reached, the presses rolled, and the issues were shipped out, errors and all - you couldn’t just re-open a file and correct a mistake that would magically propagate across the physical copies of publications on newsstands nationwide.

And then came digital.

OK, I’m not that old - I’ve used a Mac for my whole career; I wasn’t Letraset-ing headlines back at the Press Association. I have a degree in Electronic Imaging and Media Communications, which was basically faffing about with Photoshop and web design for four years at the turn of the millennium. I was forged in the fires of the digital revolution, but back in the early noughties, analogue was king, and print was still alive and kicking. Yet somewhere between my time as a fresh-faced new-media kid and a grey-bearded dad with knackered knees, digital content, services, and products became the norm. The notion of a deadline carrying any consequence went out the window.

Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, once wrote, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” Adams died in 2001, so at the time, his quote was a humorous insight into his leeway as a successful author - he could afford the luxury of not being held to ransom by publisher deadlines.

But 20+ years later, it seems the whole world has adopted Adams’ quote as a mantra to live by. And why wouldn’t we? Digital means we can change things on a whim at any time. Software mistakes can be fixed with a patch, and Final Copy can always be supplanted with Final Copy V.2 at the touch of a button.

Writing from the perspective of someone who works in e-learning, there are two consequences of this mentality, and both put unnecessary strain on the client relationship.

First, let’s look at how the term ‘deadline’ has become devoid of all meaning.

As a supplier, one of the first questions we ask clients is when their deadline is, i.e. when does this learning platform/ course/project need to be launched? At this stage, we always get a positive, and usually quite firm, response, “We need to launch by the first week of September for… reasons.” So, when planning out timelines in our project management tool, we will put a hard deadline for the first week of September and work backwards from there. We then add in milestones and deadlines for different stages of sign-off and present this to the client for approval before we start on any work.

Now, the problem is the client is so caught up in the euphoria of their e-learning dream being realised by such a talented bunch of L&D professionals that they sign off on the project plan without paying attention to the various intermediary deadlines attached to the different stages of development. So when the 15th of June rolls around, and we’re chasing approval on the wireframes due three days prior, the client informs us that their mum is in Benidorm for two weeks, and they’d like her to look at the designs first. Or when we added the final copy to all of the courses a month back, but the client’s nephew, who was doing work experience over the summer and got a pass at GCSE English, has helpfully re-written Modules 3-8 and sent it to us on a WhatsApp the day after we’ve started the testing phase. And that sets out the stall for how the project goes - the client only has that final September deadline in mind and assumes that, somehow, it will be met.

Of course, we explain the consequences: the project risks being delayed, there might be payment penalties, etc., but the client just lets it all go over their head - after all, it’s digital; it doesn’t take any time or effort, does it? It’s not like you’re a team of contractors building a house with actual bricks that need to lay the foundations before they can make the walls and add the roof before they can paint the interior and lay the carpets, is it? Actually, clients, it’s exactly like that. Digital deadlines are no different from physical deadlines for products and services. Not meeting them means projects will either be delayed or, worse, launched unfinished and of a lower quality than we, as developers, are happy with.

Our bruised egos aside, putting out low-quality products means they will need more TLC further down the line to bring them up to scratch. This leads to the second consequence of digital devaluing the deadline…

“Can you just?” culture.

Digital products aren’t tangible; you can’t drive an online course, live inside a website, or display lines of code on your mantelpiece like a custom sculpture. Yet to create a bespoke Learning Management System or an interactive learning experience takes an extraordinary amount of skill, planning and people hours. So why aren’t they attributed the same monetary or time value as physical products?

If I buy a new car, I can open the bonnet and see the engine that drives it. As I do this, I might briefly appreciate the human time and effort that’s gone into designing and building the beating heart of my new motor. Most people only ever see the surface of a digital product - words and images that are quickly scrolled past. There’s no mechanism to showcase the work done to put those words on the screen. Even something as simple as a magazine has tangibility to it - the feel of the pages, the smell of the ink. Back in the day, if you wanted to learn about the latest movie news, you had to make an effort to go to WH Smith’s and spend the money to buy a copy of Empire. Now you get all your movie news online for free.

Because of this devaluing of digital products, clients don’t see the issue with fixing, tweaking and changing things long after a product has launched into the wild. Emails beginning with “Can you just…?” are the stuff of nightmares, as it means having to explain to a customer why their seemingly innocuous request to change the logo on their platform, when they’ve supplied a pixelated jpg with a white background, is actually a shit-load of work that’s going to cost a fortune. You don’t take your car to a garage and ask them to spray it pink, thinking it will take 10 minutes and cost a fiver. And even if they agreed to undertake the work and asked you to bring your car in for 8 am Monday morning, you wouldn’t rock up at 4.45 pm and still expect it to be done on time. There’s a huge disparity between people’s digital and real-world workload expectations and the perception of the time and effort it takes to create and service online products.

I’m not saying that the analogue world and way of doing things was better (though my 80’s/90’s childhood was pretty sweet - action figures are cooler than iPhones, Appetite for Destruction is still one of the greatest albums, and Tomb Raider on Playstation 1 hasn’t been beaten). Digital innovations and products have meant that my movie collection doesn’t take up a whole room, I never have to visit a high street shop and I didn’t have to trawl bars in my 30s looking for a wife.

I am saying that just because e-learning professionals make developing your digital products look easy, doesn’t mean there isn’t a tonne of blood, sweat and tears going on behind the scenes. Oh, and time - a lot of time goes into those products too.

So stick to your bloody deadlines.