How to Improve Your Scheduling
It happens everyday. You’re asked about time you need to complete a task. The problem is that your schedules are usually far from reality. You’re not alone. Vast majority of us tend to underestimate efforts needed to complete the task. That’s oh so very common to see work done with significant time overrun. Especially developers excel in that category.
How to improve your estimates though? Two simple advices:
1. Use your past experience. Probably every single person asked to schedule something made it wrong at least few times. Very often we don’t even try to learn from that lesson. OK, I’d said it would have taken a week and after all it took more than fortnight. Why? Where I was wrong? Which assumptions were too optimistic? List things you should remember about. Use this list next time you’ll be asked to create some schedule.
2. Remember you’re not productive for the whole time. Think about all things you’ll do which can be predicted now. We tend to think that if a workday has 8 hours, we’ll spend 8 hours on the task. Forgetting things we do everyday (and can be predicted) doesn’t help to create better schedule. Think about:
• Coffee breaks. Let’s say two during a workday. 10 minutes for each (including smalltalk in a kitchen with colleagues).
• Weekly team meeting. An hour.
• More meetings? Sure. Project meetings twice a week. 3 hours.
• Some blogs and news check-up. A quarter after lunch.
• Major issues from support team. Once per fortnight. Half a day.
• Minor issues from support team. Twice per week. An hour per event.
• All those weird schedules updates, work assignments and so on. Who the heck force us to do all of that? A whole hour wasted weekly.
• Going to WC. Yep, it really takes time. 10 minutes daily.
• Writing necessary e-mails. 4 hours per week.
• Writing unnecessary e-mails. 4 hours per week.
• Deleting spam. 30 minutes weekly.
• Boss’ caviling. Quarter once per week.
Oh, is it really possible that I counted more than 4 hours every single workday? That’s half of the day! How can it be?
Another time think twice before you tell your boss that it’ll be ready on Friday.
3 comments:
And if there are any other bosses out there, think twice before you schedule unnecessary meetings or arbitrarily dictate unreasonable deadlines. Given the "right" (sic) motivation, an employee can alwasy meet the deadline ... it is a question, then, of what "meet the deadline" means in terms of software quality and completeness. You don't want to go there, because you have probably not prepared your minders for anything less than perfection.
http://hither-and-yon.blogspot.com
At the core of good scheduling is providing good estimates. One of the biggest problems is that as project team members we’re giving estimates like “2 weeks”. “2 weeks” isn’t really an estimate, it’s a guess, a prediction.
A good estimate is something like “1-4 weeks” or “3-5 days”. It really must be a range.
For more see this post on Breaking Down a Project: How Much Detail?.
A good estimate can sound like "2 weeks, 75% chance" too. Yes, estimates have to have some uncertainty and people often forget about that, treating them as they were written in the stone.
Anyway, the optimistic end of estimated range is almost always, well, way too optimistic.
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