I’m sure some rAVe readers know me as “the guy with all the aphorisms.” To be fair, not all of them are aphorisms — some are metaphors, others are sports analogies. But I digress.

Not every saying I bust out — here or in person — is a favorite. Some I don’t particularly care for, but like a tool on the wall of your shop that is seldom used, sometimes it’s exactly the right tool for a particular job.

One of those is “pressure makes diamonds.”

I’ve got some problems with that. It’s kind of like the Nietzsche quote, “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” It sounds great — real tough-guy stuff. But the corollary to that is “what doesn’t make me stronger kills me.”

Try not to dwell on that part.

Anyway, back to my point. You didn’t click on this post to watch me get bogged down in semantics.

Where am I going with this, you ask? I was working my way up to talking about one of my favorite topics: Deadlines. More specifically, I’m discussing delivery deadlines: when my dealer’s client needs their new hardware deployed. I often joke that companies typically have two speeds: glacier and panic. When a deadline is being impressed upon you by one of your business contacts, everything is a crisis and has to be addressed not now but RIGHT NOW. Conversely, when the same parties are on the other end of one of your deadlines, that sense of urgency they imposed on you is somehow lacking.

I say that as an observation, not a complaint. It’s part of the circle of life.

In fact, I was just joking in recent columns about clients leaning on my dealers to submit quotes and bills of material in a timely manner, and then sitting on them for a year or more before finally giving the go ahead to proceed with the project.

The reality is that quite often when you’re handed a Need-By deadline it’s not a life-or-death, deliver-or-we-cancel deadline. More often than not the quoted deadline is a nice-to-have and not a need-to-have. Especially in the case of large hardware deployments, there are often ETAs to source enough units, and that can take time.

One of my favorite vendors asks us to quote three to six weeks for large orders. The reason that they’re one of my favorite vendors is that they typically under-promise and over-deliver. For more than a year my orders for big deployments have come in closer to three weeks than six, and none have been overdue.

Back on track here, clear communication is essential — as it is with everything, to be fair — when dealing with deadlines and communicating logistics ETAs. More often than not, deadlines can be flexible. And if they’re not, it’s important to know that well in advance.