Doctor Submarine wrote:I doubt even Disney expects us to open in the summer of 2015. My guess is they'll move it to Christmas.
It's still a problem, because the head of a project personally assuming that they'll eventually have to push the deadline, while making everyone working on the project behave like they're not going to push the deadline, is a bad idea. You get way worse results by telling someone they have X amount of time, and then, after they've started, giving them an additional Y amount of time... than you do by budgeting the totality of that time up front, and saying they have X+Y amount of time from the get-go.
This happens in visual effects all the time, but you can apply it to any complex project.
Say you want me to build you a box. We determine the specifics, what it has to carry, how big it has to be, etc., and it turns out there's a number of ways to build it. I could do a fancy one-piece carving that would take ages but be really spectacular, or I could make it out of cardboard and hot glue and put wood-pattern stickers on it afterward, or any of a hundred other variations based on how long I have to do it.
So I ask you how long I have to work on it, and you say I have 24 hours.
No problem.
I know a lot about making boxes, so I know the exact way to give you the best possible result in 24 hours flat. This box has almost nothing in common with the 48-hour version of the box, because every aspect has to be slightly different (and faster, with attendant short cuts or simplifications, probably including working with different materials) than the slightly nicer box. The first hour of working on the 24-hour box might end with me having the rough box shape already made, and I'm already committed to the framework boards and initial assembly. Meanwhile, an hour into the 48-hour box, I'm still making precise measurements and prepping the parts of the box that will later be joined.
That doesn't mean the 24-hour box isn't going to be good, I know what I'm doing, I'm good at making boxes on whatever timeframe you want. But depending on your time scale, the whole process looks different, and every constituent step does as well.
I set out making the 24-hour version of the box, and I get some boards, make some measurements, cut them to size, tack nail them together, paint finish over a stencil on each side, let that dry, then laquer the whole box and leave it to dry. I've left myself one hour at the end of the day for final touches, maybe gluing in a nice fabric lining on the inside so your 24-hour box looks as good as it possibly can.
At 23:50, while I'm gluing fabric to the third of six interior walls, you call me up and say "sorry about the rush, we've added 24 hours to your schedule, I want the 48-hour version of the box."
...
Well, there's absolutely nothing I can do to help you. Right now I could totally make you two 24-hour boxes, because I'm almost done with the first one, right on schedule. But I have no way at all of converting what I have into the equivalent half-way point of 48-hour box. A 48-hour box would be made of entirely different stuff, assembled differently, I'd have different materials and equipment prepared, and a different blueprint. I cannot double the quality of this box, I'd have to start over and begin on a double-quality box.
Meanwhile, you've just doubled your expectations.
So what do I do? I don't fuckin' know, I'll, uh, maybe I'll add molding around the corners, I can just tack that onto what I have... and, I guess, laquer it again? It's useless. This is an outstanding 24-hour box. It's not a bad 48-hour box, it's not a half-done 48-hour box - it's not a 48-hour box.
So after 48 hours, I hand you what you ultimately asked for: a 24-hour box, that I later found out I had 48 hours to work on. Does it look like a 48-hour box? Not at all. It'll do, probably, it is a box, but this doesn't represent how good I could have made a box for you in 48 hours, it represents the result of you changing the parameters of the entire creative process after most of the creative process was finished.
