Having patience in today’s world is waiting more than 5 minutes for your latte at the coffee shop without throwing a tantrum.

Seth Godin’s article about patience and success is food for thought.

Like anything else in life, projects are an investment in time. It doesn’t matter how fast someone wants the project to be completed, things take time and, short of a time machine, time itself cannot be sped up.

Not every delay problem can be solved by throwing more people at it. If you need 100 boxes moved from room 1 to room 2, having more people moving the boxes will get the job done faster. However, there are only a few tasks that really gain speed from adding people on the team.

Writing the documentation for a product, for example, cannot be sped up by adding more people on the team. If you get several writers working on the same document, all you’ll get is a patched-up user’s manual that looks not quite put together. The cost in quality is not worth the savings in time.

At Websystems, when we work on a new version of AceProject, it’s ready when it’s ready. We avoid delivery dates for AceProject because we prefer to release a product that works well to releasing a product on a schedule. It’s harder to be patient towards the end, when all I want is to show off the new shiny version with all the cool features, but in the end it’s worth it, because when I do get to show off the new AceProject, it works.