I can tell you from experience that this doesn’t happen in the professional world. Deadlines may slip due to late client deliverables, feature creep, etc. But if nothing has changed since the statement of work was formed, we hit that deadline. If you don’t, it’s simply incompetence/laziness on the developers end.

Usually there’s something that can be negotiated on to make the deadline realistic for the time window… do that up front (because of accurate estimations) and everyone stays happy.

If you allow yourself to miss deadlines, that’s bad. If the client fails to provide negative repercussion for the failure, that’s bad, too. The combination of the two creates a downward spiral.

If the client holds you accountable? Then, the deadlines start to have meaning again. Or you have to start looking for a new job.

When I was on the client side of the desk, my most important task was keeping things on time and meeting deadlines. Now that I’m back on the agency side, I find that one of my most important tasks is keeping things on time and meeting deadlines. ;)

Oy, I’m turning this into a blog post, but there’s one more thing I wanted to say: I am not, by any means, advocating a “making deadlines at any cost” perspective. Impeccable work on deadline is always the result of near-perfect estimation. And that, as engtech mentions, is the true crux of the matter.

Okay. I’ll stop.

At Blue Flavor we hardly ever miss deadlines. When we do it’s almost always because our client is late on approval or something, usually related to content. When this happens we usually try to make the time up. Some times we can’t, when we can’t we make sure to set expectations to that end.

Missing deadlines happens for various reasons, and is usually not a problem as long as there is a good reason and the expectations are reset.

For me personally I pride myself on always meeting my deadlines and I do my best to hold my co-workers to that as well.

You’re totally right though, clients really do appriceate a designer who’s on time and meets their deadlines.

Good read: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000245.html

As a client, I don’t want to hear about the problems with other clients when I’m doing everything that was asked.

I don’t want to hear that my deadline was pushed back without telling me.

I have no patience for less than quality work because of bad time management.

Let’s tell the truth. People push deadlines back because they can get away with it. People take on too much work or miscalculate how much time a project will take. The client is at the mercy of the designer, programmer, whatever because THEY have a deadline. They can’t scrap a project and start all over again.

The bottom line is that there are tons of talented people. Customer service (and that’s what this is) will make a “good designer” the best designer to a client because it is someone they can count on. Someone they can recommend.

When a deadline is made it’s giving someone you’re word. Keep it because in the end, the skills won’t be enough.