How to meet your deadlines – A quick guide to ensure you are never late
Oh, the dreaded deadline! You have a week’s worth of work to do by tomorrow. If that has ever happened to you, then you should know that feeling well. In the following lines I will try to give a few tips that should alleviate that feeling. Let’s begin!
Don’t underestimate the work
This is something that needs to be done in the planning stage. Estimating the amount of time a piece of work is going to take is as much an art as it is a science. It takes a great deal of experience to do it right. In most cases things are going to take longer than expected. A process that works really well for me is breaking down the work into the smallest piece of self-contained work (call them tasks, tickets, whatever you want, the concept remains the same). It is much easier accurately estimate a small piece of work, than a big one. When you have a list of small and self-contained tasks you can begin to add estimate them. At the end, add the values together and you have a deadline.
Give yourself some slack!
Estimating a task involves accounting for the unexpected. Unexpected events have an unbalanced effect on the deadlines. This is a fancy way of saying that bad things happen much more often than good things. Things will break, and they will need to be fixed, you will have to wait for other teams to be done with their work, specs and assets will be late, computers do break from time to time and that will certainly affect your deadlines. The more dependencies you have on your task, the more slack you need. This may sound extreme, but I usually add a 30% slack on the dev time and even that proves to be insufficient from time to time.
Be honest with the stakeholders
Do not commit to more work than you are able to do! Remember, in the long run, doing things right is much faster than doing things fast. If you need to rush through work, you will unavoidably make mistakes that tend to add up over time and slow down future development time. You have probably heard this before, but I’m going to say it anyway: Do quality work from the start, even if it takes slightly longer now, it will save you tons of time later down the road.
Track progress as you go along
It is much easier to make corrections to your course as you are traveling towards your destination. How does this translates into a helpful tip? Glad you’ve asked! To sum up: It’s easier to correct for small delays than large ones. That sounds reasonable enough, right? The trick here is to spot delays as early as possible. If you have a timeline for your project, you should be able to say at any moment if you are on track. When the work slips, it’s going to be easier to account for a small delay. By doing this regularly, it should never come as a surprise to have to do a month worth of work withing a week.
That’s all we have for today! Hope you have enjoyed it! See you next week!