Cut your software team some slack!
Building contingency buffers into plans lets the team respond to changes, growth, and surprises with less damage to schedule commitments.
My manager once called me and asked, “Got an hour?” He’d been approached by a scientist in our company who’d written a simple program on his PC to calculate formulas for some chemical solutions that he used in his research. The scientist wanted one of us software people to port his program to our mainframe so that others could use it.
On the surface this seemed like a quick job. My manager’s initial request really would have taken only a couple of hours. However, I realized that there was much more to the problem. The program needed to include more calculations than this scientist had addressed, because different researchers worked with different chemicals. The calculations had to be more accurate than his simple homegrown approach considered. We also needed a flexible interface that would work for a large user group and generate reports suitable for use in the lab.
I explored the full spectrum of requirements with some user representatives and researched how to improve the computational accuracy. Then I designed a solution, coded the software, and tested the application. This project consumed just over 100…
