Setting realistic deadlines proves challenging due to our consistent underestimation of task completion times, despite past experiences. Unrealistic deadlines generate unnecessary stress and harm trust with peers. To mitigate these risks, five strategies enhance our ability to estimate project timelines effectively. - Break down tasks into smaller parts and estimate each individually. - Add buffer time to schedules, expecting to use only a fraction of the available time. - Use historical data from similar tasks to inform current estimations. - Reduce the scope of projects, prioritizing quality over quantity. - Communicate obstacles early and often if challenges arise.
This article highlights the planning fallacy, a common issue for Engineering Leaders when setting unrealistic deadlines that lead to stress and diminished trust among team members and stakeholders. A key takeaway is to break down tasks into smaller parts and add buffers to schedules, allowing for more accurate estimations and improved project management.
What is it about?
The article(plus a comic) describes our pattern of not being able to set realistic deadlines to a task despite having done similar ones in the pasta. Even if we suck at setting them, there are benefits to perform this activity as it pushes us to pursue the completion of the tasks based on the way our brains react to time sensitive constraints.
The downside is that deadlines that are too unrealistic have a negative effect work as they generate unnecessary stress and they hurt our trust with peers and stakeholders when we are unable to meet them. In the this post from the Doist team they some strategies that can help us mitigate these risks.
What are the key take aways?
To mitigate the impact of not being able to accurately estimate the time to complete a project or a task, we can follow these 5 simple strategies:
- Break down the problem into smaller parts and estimate them individually
- Add buffer to your schedule, assume you will only dedicate a fraction of the available time to complete it. This will give you extra time if things start to delay, as it mostly happens, specially on environments of high ambiguity and complexity.
- Use similar tasks done in the past to compare with your estimations of the current task, the more historical data the better.
- Reduce the scope of what you are trying to accomplish, optimise for quality over quantity.
- If none of the strategies above are enough, communicate early and often the obstacles that appear in your way.
