Part of Listed's 100 Day Writing Challenge.

Wanted to share some project management technics in IT based job. More specifically, on the timeline and estimates aspect.

Project Timeline

In a typical organizational settings, your project tends to be funded by someone. The funding can be lump sum or milestone based. It can also be just your boss investing in a startup (by hiring employees and paying them). Regardless of the scenario, one thing tends to be common: They want to know the project's progress, how much more to success, whar are some blockers, etc.

Usually as an IT worker, you ideally have the luxury of a project manager that overviews the entire project's timeline. But you do have some responsibility to share with your project manager your own tasks' timelines.

Estimates

One to achieve sharing of timeline is through estimates. This is usually possible with more experience roles or those who know the system well, and already forsee what they need to do and look into to achieve the goal. Simply put, you just give how many days it will take to get a task done. Give your project manager your expected average day to get a task done and the worst case.

Problem is, not all task can be estimated like this. How do you truely know you will be done in 1 week? How do you know there wont be unexpected issues occuring? This is why it should only be reserved for tasks you really know deeply about and feel confident in.

Therefore, the best way is to give your estimates in 2 stage approach. First stage is time taken to discover/research how long it takes to do the task, second stage is time taken to do the task. For this, you ijform your project manager you will take 1~3 days to look at the task first and give an actual estimate after. Then after 1~3 days of looking into the project task, you can confidently give an estimate that you require one week to do. Through this, you greatly reduce the risk of missed deadlines for your task.

Updates

Another way is to just give constant updates. Usually, updates can be in every few days, or when you hit some progression/roadblock in your task. This can be used with estimates as well so that everyone is in loop to know if your task is on track or not.

Usually the frequency of updates depends on urgency or importance of the task. Very urgent or important tasks can be updated daily (probably where the dreaded daily standups coke from), while others can be updated once a few days. It is important to note that time spend giving updates is time that would have been spent on doing the task. Your updates should be as concise as possible, and usually aim to indicate if your on track, and what additional resources you need. Project managers should just require information to know if your on track and help to provide you resources if further needed. Explaining technical details to your project managers shouldnt be a nessacity.

Tagging

Finally, tag your tasks. When you got a new task on hand or a kanban board full of technical tasks, it should all be tagged. The tags should show:

• Size of the task.
• Complexity of the task.
• Technical Expertise (Ex. Security, Cloud or DevOps, etc).
• Urgency of the task.
• Others as you see fit. For example, could tag to indicate that it requires a lot of request forms which are potential blockers, etc

Usually the more experienced ones in the team should tag the task. This helps project managers plan ahead for future taskings as well and let any future task takers on the backlog in estimations. Small thing, takes ~5 minutes per task on the kanban, but very useful.

Afterword

It shouldnt be about Project Manager vs IT Staff, in fact both should work together. Project managers should protect IT staff from anything up and above the chain about project progress, and aim to provide resouces to help IT Staff where needed. IT Staff is expected to focus on their tasks, but still provide Project Manager resources (progress tracking) in order for them to update stakeholders.