Arbitrary dates destroy software and service value

Here is an article by "Gandalf Hudlow" from IISM on the failure of date-driven schedules. I have a slightly different perspective that accommodates date-driven schedules but enables the creation of business value.

Some mature software and service industries run on "train schedules" of relatively frequent releases, where the business and customer never know what they will get in each release but they know they will get something at the scheduled release times.  For example, as a user of Google Keep, I did not know when Google would ship integration with Assistant to be able to say, "OK Google, remove milk from my Safeway list." But it was obvious to me that eventually such a  feature would arrive.  Similarly Microsoft sends out monthly patches on the first Tuesday of every month but you never know which updates will blow away all your settings or brick your device.

Many software or services are intended to meet some business goal or innovate in some way that consumers will immediately love, disrupting an entrenched consumer norm.  In these cases, schedule-driven software development always fails to deliver value to customers and results in much more waste than enabling normal software gestation and postpartum iteration until the business objective is achieved.  Across all industries, 70% of software projects fail to produce their intended business result because the specific business purpose of the software becomes schedule-driven.  In these cases I agree with the author.