🚀 go-pugleaf

On 24 Nov 2004 17:38:13 -0800, infer...@my-deja.com (inferno2000)
wrote:

>Just curious as to the reasoning behind this. The project manager
>assigned a chap 1 week to finish certain work, which he failed to
>complete. The project manager then has no choice but to reassign some
>of the work to others on the team, so now everyone has to work for
>some extra hours to catch up. And it becomes the project manager's
>fault? 

Yup. That's a faulty schedule. Such tight dependencies need to be
identified and planned for in advance. Not saying that's easy ... but
if you lack this ability or a method of doing this, you cannot be a
good software project manager, period.

Secondly, you need to look at WHY the task was late. Rarely is the
cause a "lazy employee" (and if so why is he still working for you?).
Usually it's bad time estimates. It's also the project manager's job
to get accurate time estimates ... and to build in slack in the
schedule for typical known causes of slippage ...  illness of
employees, inexperience of a particular person doing the task or
estimating time for it, novelty of the task (e.g., is it something
your company has never done before)? So not only do you get realistic
estimates, you have actual formulas for expanding the time based on
how inaccurate you know the estimate itself to be.

Oh yeah, to get back on topic re EA and overtime ... a typical cause
of bad time estimates is that employers *rarely* track how long it
actually takes to do something. So someone codes something in two
weeks during a crunch, and it's never logged that the programmer
actually worked 140 hours in those two weeks. So the same mistake is
repeated on the next project, a similar task is scheduled for two
weeks.