Why your project is always late — know your true supply hour

Project planning isn’t easy, especially if you are under pressure to deliver. But why do we always wildly underestimate the amount of time that is required to complete a project?

From the face of it, if our estimation is correct and there are no unexpected errors, then we should complete the project on time, right?? I recently completed a POC project, and frankly, I didn’t encounter any major obstacles. However, I was only able to deliver it after working over time! So what’s the problem?

Luckily, I keep a diary of the work that I do and when I reviewed it to see where I spend my time, I came to the following conclusion.

If you think you have a week to do it, you are really saying, I can do it in 2 days.

Everybody has a different schedule and my schedule can be wildly different to yours, but I suggest that you try to record your calendar for a month and then review how your time is spent so you have a better idea of your true supply hour per week.

The following is a breakdown of my weekly calendar based on the diary of my last 2 companies. The number of days for each section is based on a 50 working hour week, that is 10 hours a day for 5 days excluding breaks.

Company/department-wide initiatives and commitments

These are meetings that everyone is invited to, whether it’s an all-hands, business review or awareness initiatives such as LGBTIQ day. These don’t happen often, but when they do, they take can take your morning or afternoon away.

These can also include voluntary sessions such as lunch and learn or a business showcase that is closely related to your work.

Estimate: 0.5 days/5hours a week — total: 0.5 days

Team commitments

We spend a lot of our time with our team, we share responsibilities and we support each other to produce synergy.

Working in a team requires planning, review and allocation or human resources. This will generally include sprint planning, retros and action items, 1-on-1s with your manager.

There are also tasks that rotates within a team like preparing a brown bag session on the latest data science development to on-call rotations.

I love supporting my team and although they do consume a significant amount of my time, I strongly believe they foster a better team environment and generates efficiency. Whether it is reviewing a PR or new proposal, or collaboration in a brain storming session or code pairing.

Estimate: 1 day/10 hours per week — total 1.5 days

Secondary Tasks

It is rare that we are assigned a single project at any time. Things break, so we have to fix them, there are small tasks that the PM will assign to you because we think we can do it in an hour or follow-ups from the project that you just completed.

Estimate: 1 day/10 hours per week — total 2.5 days

Communication:

This can be responding to an email or a message on Slack, or spontaneous meeting with stakeholders or other collaborators to clarify an issue.

Estimate: 0.5 days/5 hours per week — total 3 days

Summary

The commitment can change from week to week, you may spend more time or some while less on others.

But as you can see from the breakdown, once we have factored in all the necessary commitments, we are really left with 2 days per week. So to avoid my mistake and avoid working overtime

Know how much time you really have for your next project!