I was just made aware of a great video on scrum, a popular agile process to help manage software projects.

It's a long video, but at least watch the few minutes starting at about 41:15. It really hit home for me, and demonstrates the exact message I've been struggling to explain for weeks.

Basically, it explains how 'hurrying up' by reducing quality to meet a deadline makes all the work after that start at slower pace, or forces teams to reduce quality even further. Good stuff...