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Why projects take longer than you think
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floobydust:
Hardware and software are two totally different birds for time estimating and project management.

I've had S/W managers attempt to manage H/W and the result is a total disaster.
Understanding the huge differences is not easy or something you can pick up reading a paragraph on the Internet.
Vtile:

--- Quote from: Tomorokoshi on April 16, 2019, 09:13:20 pm ---Who is asking the questions about the project? What kinds of questions do they ask?

Usually those asking the questions are a collection of horizontal and vertical layers of management relative to the various engineering groups.

The questions they are asking are usually:
How long is it going to take?
When is it going to be done?
How long would it take to add this feature?

usually followed by:
Shouldn't that take just a couple days?

What questions are not being asked? How about:
Do we have a clear idea of what the product should be?
What can I do (as a manager) to clear the way? ("move furniture", as Joel Spolsky says)
Do I (at a management level) understand the existing product, the current technology, the new product, the market, etc.?

The illustration above about using a personal credit card to expedite a Digi-Key order hit way too close to home, and it seems relatively common. To put some numbers on it, let's say an engineer with a burdened cost of $100,000 per year works on a project with an expected budget of $1,000,000. An order of $100 is necessary to move a key part of the design forward.

So suppose it's Wednesday the 1st at 5:30 PM and to expedite an issue you want to make a Next Day Digi-Key order for delivery on Thursday the 2nd. The boss left at 5:00 PM, and he as the one credit card for the group. So it's entered by 6:00 PM but it won't get processed anyway until the next day because Purchasing leaves at 4:00 PM. But then it doesn't get processed because the purchaser took Friday the 3rd off, so now it doesn't get ordered until Monday the 6th, but they did 3-day delivery instead of next day, making it arrive on Friday the 10th.

Did this save any money anywhere in the process? What is the value of expediting blocking processes like that? Would a $1000 credit card per engineer be worth while? The liability on a $1000 credit card is... $1000. With an engineer who is answerable to what is purchased, so ordering cookies or golf balls probably won't happen. What is the liability of a week of delay? $10,000?

Look at all the relative orders of magnitude here. The little tasks get in the way large responsibilities, like priority inversion in some embedded system.

--- End quote ---
+1

Question asked about task schedule ... Just answer with even more complex question.
Psi:
I forget the formula but there was a study of many industrial/commercial projects and how long they took vs what people expected at the start.

They came up with a formula where you stick in
- How long you expect the project to take if everything goes well.
- How long you expect the project to take if everything goes to shit.
- How many other projects are being done by the company at the same time.
- How hard the project is overall (easy, medium, hard).
etc.. And it spits out how long the project will likely take.


It's also a good idea to get some feedback into the project management cycle.
If all previous projects took on average 10% longer than expected then you add 10% to new project estimates.

Once you get a system that is accuracy estimating overall project time you can then start fine tuning individual processes to try make them faster.

The good thing is that the system self corrects. Any delays caused by management messing with processes causes the next project to pre-allocate more time to account for this.


SilverSolder:

--- Quote from: AndyC_772 on April 16, 2019, 07:55:45 pm ---Half a day wasted because of an unforeseen technical problem outside my control, and the half hour I'd saved on building the board was gone many times over.

--- End quote ---

This is what ends up killing otherwise well thought out estimates - the "unknown unknowns".   Really the only things we can estimate reliably is work that we have done before, down to the last detail - and even that can go wrong!

ataradov:

--- Quote from: Psi on April 16, 2019, 11:21:28 pm ---The good thing is that the system self corrects. Any delays caused by management messing with processes causes the next project to pre-allocate more time to account for this.

--- End quote ---
And this is exactly how Agile development works on a high level. Not only managements screw ups, but also new hires, movements between teams and all this stuff gets factored in.
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