Recently, I encountered my first experience not meeting a deadline in industry due to underestimating the time needed to complete the task. The task was to obsolete a product line which should have taken around a week for me to complete. However, my project manager and I did not take into account the time needed for the document to get approved from document control. Document control by policy is given at least four days to review your document and get back to you with a response. Then after the four days you have to make edits to the document and resubmit it to document control. The project manager in this case should have taken into account the four day policy for document control to review the document. The project manager should have also taken into account that document control will most likely reject the document on its first submission. This would have allowed me two weeks to complete the document record for obsoleting the product line.
Some methods that a project manager can develop in order to properly account for employees underestimating task duration are one holding weekly meetings towards the end of the week to check on the progress of the project. This ensures if the manager needs to deploy someone to a specific portion of the project and also build team spirit. However, a downfall of this method is meeting can be seen as unproductive. So one way of preventing this is by having each employee talk about their progress in a limited time period. I feel communication is the biggest issue that causes the project to fall behind in its progress.
A time where my team ran into a problem was during my capstone project. One problem I kind of foresaw was communication between my role and the graphic user interface (GUI) person role. In my team, we had the graphic user interface programmer, who was in charge of the creating the game landscape, training algorithm, and making sure the data is transferred to the remote database. My role was establishing communication between the phone and the remote database. I would create methods that would take a user input and thus send it to the remote database. I made sure I talked to GUI programmer how to implement the code into the script he was writing so the right information is transferred to the database.
My job as a biomedical equipment technician is to work with a team in order to complete work orders for over a dozen different types of medical devices. Recently my team and I underestimated the time period of a project mainly due to lack of resources. Our estimate was accurate in accordance to the speed at which we worked, however our inventory did not contain enough components to maintain the speed of our work. Therefore, our manager decided to extend our purchasing limits in order to maintain our inventory proportionately according to our workload.
It can be quite difficult to estimate task duration if the wrong personnel are not responsible for allocating time for the tasks. For instance, during our mini-simulation, one of the team members who did not have expertise on the task assigned the duration for it. This led to some issues because the actual expert estimated that the task would take 16 months when the person who assigned the duration put the timeline for 4 months. This led to complications in the project management. Thus, whenever tasks are being allotted the duration, it is necessary that the person assigning the duration is an expert in that field or there is already a comparable metric for that task to assign the duration.
During the planning phase of a project estimations play a critical role. For medical device projects the cost estimation is not always straightforward as discussed in the lectures. Another estimation that can be misleading is the task duration estimation provided by individuals. Often times while working in industry you notice that team members underestimate the task duration completion. This can occur because of lack of expertise/knowledge in a new area of research or as mentioned in the lecture issues can come up such as being sick. There have been instances at work where we receive an estimate for a week from certain facilities on international projects and the task is not completed within the time period referenced. As a project manager these problems may arise because of differences in work culture/certain facilities being more busy on a another project and not being able to deliver on time. What are some methods that a project manager can develop in order to properly account for employees underestimating task duration? Do you have specific examples from your experience where you ran into these problems, if so were you able to find solutions?
As a PM, I think it's very important to have a deep understanding of the projects you're resourced to. If you truly understand what the goal of the project is and what the deliverables are to complete that project, that will allow you to accurately come up with due dates and deadlines for when tasks will be completed. When creating a timeline and setting project deadlines, I think it's probably a best practice to for the PM to lay out all the deliverables required to complete the project, and then have the individuals completing those deliverables commit to dates when they think they can have them completed. I think the individuals should be coming up with their own deadlines because they know what their workload looks like and also how long it takes to complete each task. Once the deadlines have been communicated to the PM, they can then step in and make adjustments if necessary, i.e. if certain tasks need to be completed before others then deadlines for those tasks will need to be set accordingly. In general though, I think it's safest to "under commit, over deliver". In other words, if you think a specific task is going to take 2 weeks to complete, you should build in a buffer period of a few days to account for unforeseen roadblocks such as a shift in priorities of your project team, sick/vacation days, etc. So, you would tell management the task will actually take 2.5 - 3 weeks to complete and if the individual can actually complete it in 2 weeks like they originally planned, then it looks like you're ahead of schedule!
@jp582 All your points are valid. However, I've been in many situations where we are presenting the overall project ghant chart to the customer/management, and almost immediately the first question is "How can we reduce the project timeline?". The time added for unexpected events/breakdowns is hard to justify when the project timeline is tight. Management doesn't want to show the customer a prolonged/drawn out timeline. This is especially true during the bidding process. If vendor A pads the timeline to make it actually representative of the project (say 30 weeks), while vendor B comes in with a faster timeline (say 25 weeks), vendor B will most likely get win the contract. Vendor B however is assuming a perfect project, which never happens. Therefore vendor A's management will pressure the project team to cut the timeline, getting rid of all the back up time built into the project.
I have run into these problems on a smaller and more personal scale. I am currently completing my master's thesis, which revolves around the early design and development of a medical device. I am far enough along in the thesis to be considering data collection. But with how Covid-19 has changed the world over these past few weeks, collecting data on 20 people is not worth the risk. This meant that the data based parts of my thesis needed to be adjusted. Through several meetings with my adviser (who can be the managerial stand in) it was decided that the experiments that I would run would be greatly changed. I am fortunate enough to be in a position where making changes like that is quite easy as I had just started the planning phase for the experiments. For someone further on, say actually conducting experiments, this becomes quite hard to adjust as procedures have been written and approved.
I think part of the project manager's job is to look over what the employees are doing and their submissions of work. So if the someone says a certain task will take them a week and you have no idea how they're getting it done in less than a month in general, you can look at the breakdown for their time management or just go talk to them and see their plan. Also it might just be good management practice to plan for these mistakes to happen and therefore make a cushion so you're not always pressed against the clock and your team and project can afford having a few delays and not have it kill the whole workflow.
Having a lack of knowledge in the new area of research or issues with international projects that become delayed because its not completed do have an effect on task duration. When working with international companies, their timeline and how they work should also be accounted for. They might have different holidays or vacation hours which can impact projects and prolong the timeline. Working with domestic companies also should consider what their policies are on vacations and what their timelines are because teams and rules differ even within company. Many companies work on multiple projects at once and prioritizing these projects in important to meet the deadlines. It’s best to prioritize which projects need attention right now and what projects can be put on hold or done at a slower pace. Sometimes problems do arise like many employees working from home which should be accounted for on how much of a delay it would cause for projects to take. Getting updates from the team members is also essential and having consistent check ins to make sure everyone is on track is a good idea.
Estimating the project duration plays a vital role in planning phase. The project deadlines are important in finishing up the project in the estimated time. To prevent this, add time to each task to estimate how much each other team member has underestimated it. Be sure not to miss any necessary tasks. Assigning correct resources, setting up the implementation date, managing the unknown changes etc. could make sure that project is travelling through the right direction in the estimated time. Hence time management is one of the important step in project decision analysis.
It it really important to have steps to estimate a project :
Steps in estimating
• A statement of scope or scope document that defines what
the project is and is not
• A task list in the form of a work breakdown structure (WBS)
• The task details defined (not simply a list of task names)
• Duration estimations provided by the team
• Task dependencies (schedule and risks) clarified
• Schedule risks identified, such as:Critical Path? (longest
consecutive, slack-less path)
• Planned schedule risk mitigation
@bb254 I completely understand the hardship of underestimating a timeline. Underestimating a timeline for a project in most cases isn't a 1 person's fault. Sometimes it's due to miscommunication between departments. For intense, there was supposed to be a start date for a clinical study and my team couldn't catch up to be on track for the study. Decisions by upper management were very underestimated. Circumstances occurred where we received a big shipment of the wrong reagents a few days before the start date of the study. Due to a lack of proper management for the inventory, the study was delayed for 2 months. The project timeline was underestimated, and the deadline was not met.
I believe a Project Manager should also check in with his/her team members especially check in with the timeline. The PM should always go over the timeline and if he believes it might not be possible to complete a task in the time given it should be changed. The PM and the team members are always in contact and if a problem arises that will prevent a certain task from be accomplished in a timely manner it should be addressed and fixed before it causes a greater problem. This does put pressure on the PM but that is part of the job. The PM needs to be on top of these things because they need to be able to control situations and problems so they do not get out of hand.
Like each aspect of a project life cycle, it's important to keep communicating and being clear with your team members/ people involved in the project. It is also important to also be aware of how long processing time takes in the company that you work in for both the project manager and the team members. It may mean that some tasks, if not the project, would be not be completed in the timeline that the PM would initially want, but it is more imperative that the project is done right rather than scrambling and having to fix problems post deadline.
While problems in a project's lifecycle are inevitable, it is vital to have lanes of communication between all members on the team so that they can deal with such problems. A PM can do his/her best to estimate the duration for tasks, but they always have to plan for failure and manage the risk that the task will become overdue. Thus, it is their job to educate their team and cultivate consistent communication within the team so that when the problem arises, they can deal with it and remediate it in an orderly fashion so the task is not overdue to a serious degree where it would affect the critical path of the project.
