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.