We are named after a date. Here is why that is not a gimmick.

When a supplier says four to six months, the client hears four and the supplier means six. Nobody has lied and nobody has agreed anything. The number that gets written on the board paper is the optimistic one, and the number that gets delivered against is the other one.

Then something slips by a fortnight, which is nothing, and nobody raises it because the range still covers it. Three of those and the range does not cover it any more, and by then the conversation is a difficult one rather than an ordinary one.

A single date removes the hiding place. It is either going to be met or it is not, and everyone can see which from a long way off.

Nobody can commit to a date before understanding the problem, and anyone who does it at the proposal is guessing with your money. Here the date is fixed at the end of the shaping phase, once every screen has been drawn and every rule written down.

By that point roughly a third of the thinking is done and perhaps a sixth of the money is spent. That is the earliest honest moment, and it is also early enough to be useful to you.

From then on the date does not move. It becomes the fixed point that every other decision is taken against.

When something takes longer than expected, and something always does, there are three things that can give: the date, the quality, or how much gets built. Most projects let quality give, quietly, because it is the only one nobody has to admit to.

We give on scope, openly, and you choose what gives. If the reporting is going to cost the launch, the reporting comes out and follows six weeks later. You will always prefer that to a system that arrives on time and cannot be trusted.

This is only possible because of how the build is ordered. The most valuable thing is built first, so what is left at the end is genuinely the least painful to postpone. That ordering is decided with you during shaping, and it is the single most important conversation of the whole project.

Occasionally something genuinely unforeseeable happens: a supplier withdraws an interface, a regulator changes a rule mid-build, a key person on your side leaves. Those are the conditions under which a date moves.

What never happens is finding out late. You hear it the week it becomes visible, with the reason, the options and the cost of each. Then you decide, rather than being told what has already been decided.

A date that moves once, openly, with six weeks' notice, is a project being run properly. A date that holds right up until the fortnight before is a project about to go badly wrong.