Accurate time estimation is a crucial skill in project management. Without it, you won't know how long your project will take, and you won't be able to get commitment from the people who need to sign it off. Even more importantly for your career, sponsors often judge whether a project has succeeded or failed depending on whether it has been delivered on time and on budget. To have a chance of being successful as a project manager, you need to be able to negotiate sensible budgets and achievable deadlines.
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?
There is a lot of times where I, or my team, has underestimated task duration. On numerous task where we underestimated task duration my supervisor set up strict deadlines for certain task, so that we could make time for what needed to be done and get it done in a timely manner. This helped us prioritize a little better because we knew certain task were due by a certain date. This made us ask for help from our colleagues with everyday miscellaneous tasks so we could focus on our project because we would get consumed in our day to day lab operations which would make us put off our project. A specific example of this was recently when I was a part validating an instrument in my lab. It was the ICP-MS. Because me, nor my colleagues, have ever worked with an ICP-MS before it took a lot of time to validate it. The company expected it to take six months to validate and it took a year. In order to find a solution we distributed task amongst the group and by breaking up whole project into smaller task for multiple people, the validation got done quicker.
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?
Some methods that a project management can develop in order to properly account for employees underestimating task duration is to have a cut off date as to when things will be due. I would also have them create a to do list that is appropriate for each day to ensure that they are not missing anything. I believe that a project management will have to plan, plan, plan and then requests updates on the project to just ensure it is moving accordingly. If someone gets sick have a plan for that. It is also always great to have a backup plan for the backup plan. I have in the past ran into issues with not having enough people due to someone falling ill. To offset this and ensure we did not fall behind we spilt that persons tasks amongst the team so that we did not underestimate the time allotted to complete.
This question shows the importance of the project manager understanding and knowing their team. By knowing each person's personality and strengths/weaknesses you can easily work around the team underestimating or being new to a task. I would say a good practice is to allow for more time the first time around and maybe even the second time, and then shortening the period of time for future tasks. This gives the team time to train and become familiar with what they have to do, then in the future they will be able to do the tasks much faster. You can research how long it usually takes individuals to perform certain tasks and use that information to estimate. For example, if it takes three to four days on average to complete a test plan, then you may want to give the team a week at first and then cut it down to the three days. It also does not hurt to ask the team themselves how long they would take to do certain tasks. This way you can make sure the team is comfortable and give them time to get adjusted first.
As a project manager, accounting for employee underestimation of task duration is a common challenge. Underestimating task duration can be extremely detrimental to the success of a project because it often leads to missed deadlines and risk accumulation. A couple efficient methods that a project manager can develop includes the critical path method and the bottom-up method. In project management, the critical path is the longest group of tasks that have to be done for the project to be deemed successful. Therefore, the critical path method identifies the tasks that are critical to projects overall success and estimates the time it will take to complete them. This means that there are also task that aren't critical and can be delayed or even ignored without jeodpordizing the project. As for the bottom-up method, this is when the project is broken down into smaller, more manageable tasks. Then, once the smaller tasks have been identified, the amount of time it will take to complete each task can be estimated and then added to get an overall task duration. In my experience with capstone, I have ran into underestimating task duration mainly because of poor planning. When having to 3D print a part for our project, we did not account for the amount of time it takes to print the part, nor how many times we would have to adjust the design of the part. To combat this, we sat down with our advisor and developed a more detailed design with all of the highlighted needs so that we could print a final prototype.
In order to efficiently manage time in projects, project managers should assess the abilities and backgrounds of team members and adjust plans accordingly, all the while encouraging an environment of responsibility and flexibility among team members. This entails incorporating buffer time into timetables for unforeseen circumstances, creating backup plans, and keeping lines of communication open to reduce the possibility of underestimating work durations and missing deadlines. Furthermore, consistent progress tracking and adaptability to unanticipated obstacles are essential components of successful project management. To ensure the success of the project, all departments concerned should take into account probable contingencies.
I can definitely recount several instances where projects were delayed due to underestimating task duration and lead-time for resource acquisition. The startup was interested in analyzing blood samples from aged human donors and it took several months to acquire the samples. The original project plan did not take into account that the tissue vendor would need to recruit volunteers that satisfied the inclusion/exclusion criteria that were listed. They assumed that the blood samples could be instantly shipped after ordering. So, this unfortunately caused delays for the entire project.
This example highlighted the importance of developing a flushed-out work breakdown structure so that an accurate task duration timeline can be estimated. This really taught us that proper planning literally requires planning out every single step and material, this means every necessary catalog/part number and even establishing relations which all prospective vendors to see if certain groups can better accommodate your project timeline. Although this was a costly mistake, it is not uncommon and it was a valuable lesson for all team members.
There are several strategies that project managers can use to properly handle situations where workers underestimate the duration of tasks. Breaking down project tasks into smaller, more manageable chunks and setting an approximate time for each is one such strategy. Also, it is very important to have open, effective and frequent communication between stakeholders throughout the project to discuss issues, progress and any changes that may be necessary to the length of the tasks. Sometimes project managers leave some buffer time between tasks to cover unforeseen problems or potential delays.
