From announcement to delivery in SharePoint Online

Microsoft made some fantastic announcements at Ignite 2018 for SharePoint Online. It was clear that the features promised were going to be delivered over time. Helpfully, at the time, sessions provided roadmap milestones. Many, too many as it turned out, were earmarked for the ‘end of 2018’ Conservatively I expected this to be into Targeted Release (TR) but 100%. Subsequent blogs were marked as December and the Microsoft 365 Roadmap started to shift dates up a month. This combined with TR now rolling out in % stages has many features promised in September have failed to make even TR yet. Many customers (tenants) will test into TR, sensibly, before Production looms. Logically, the last tenants receiving updates into TR may have a shorter window into Production with no ability to throttle deployment. Clearly TR has grown across the installed base so Microsoft has to stage releases even for this cohort. Understandable, but we have definitely come to the point where Microsoft needs to provide per tenant advice in the M365 Roadmap to give better guidance to administrators. What are others thoughts? I’m thrilled by the innovation in SPO over the last two years but the weight of change is clearly slowing delivery down. Is this a personal perception? How are you handling this in larger deployments? Thanks!