How can you manage your team's time on high-accountability projects?

Effectively manage your team's time on high-accountability projects by setting clear priorities and deadlines. Foster a culture of open communication and ensure team members understand the project's goals and expectations. Implement agile methodologies to promote flexibility and adaptability. Regularly assess progress and address potential bottlenecks promptly. Encourage a balance between focused work and necessary breaks to maintain productivity and prevent burnout.

Apart from project planning, it is important to foster an environment of transparent communication among team members. Encourage team members to discuss issues, exchange ideas, and work together to find solutions. This improves team cohesiveness and makes it possible to see any problems before they get out of hand. To stay focused and productive, use time management strategies like the Pomodoro Technique or agile approaches. Finally, understand how crucial a work-life balance is to avoiding burnout. In order to create a productive and long-lasting work environment, promote breaks and offer assistance to team members who are having difficulties.

Establish high-accountability flags. Define clear goals with realistic timelines/milestones. Facilitate resources, tools, and effective governance. Along with break down into more sub manageable tasks, Allocate resources effectively. Encourage open communication and feedback. Learn from used cases for continuous improvement.

Always try to have tangible deliverables each task and story to mark progress and help people self-pace. At the same time, acknowledge that iteration is often part of the development process with some stories by setting targets aimed first at functional, then polished, then debugged and final.

Unpopular Opinion - you cannot manage anyone's time but your own. It's a myth to think otherwise. You'll only frustrate yourself if you try. Bold statement: 100% of leaders who try to manage people's time have not managed their own properly. If you are a leader of a team - then you should have already taken your time and defined clear goals and expectations. This takes time and is more than a bullet point or wish list. You must internalize/visualize and then try to articulate a clear where we are going and why. This allows your team to manage their own time to the goal. Which is what you want - they may get so bought in they give time you could never (and should never) ask for. That's called ownership. If not clear, it can't be owned.

When I worked for Chipotle, we all fell for the trap - and I bet the next time you are there you will see it too. They try to make more than one burrito/bowl at a time. They need to limit their work in progress. We all think it's faster to scoop rice twice, beans twice, meat twice all the way down the line. IT IS NOT. Especially in this environment where each one can change - even though it's rice, beans and meat - it's the seconds between each switch to the other burrito that slows you down. It's the mistake, when the customer says "carnitas" - you put it on the first burrito but it was for the second. We make mistakes and slow ourselves down when we try to take in too much. Our work becomes the bottle neck to what we can finish.

"We need to have some idea so we can plan our roadmap." - We have all heard this. I want some idea too. Here's what I do have - hope. We hope to get this out to market by Q4. Given past delivery, the technologies we use and how complex my team sees this, we think we can achieve it. Realistic estimates must sound like hope. Anything more concrete is not realistic. You don't know what you don't know. Set delivery dates must shift to hopeful milestones. This keeps it a goal to hit instead of an ultimatum of pass/fail. We track the time simply by saying we hoped for X, here's what actually it took. Then use that empirical data for the next best guess at delivery. To make it more than this is to complicate and frustrate.

People often stink at estimating. That's why SCRUM uses relative estimating (t-shirt sizes) mapped to scrum points to calculate sprint velocity. These use a fibonacci sequence instead of days or hours to stop people from translating and reverting to time-based estimating.

Pairing up on critical path items can greatly reduce the risks of slips, whether this is actually dividing up the work or just mentoring and code reviews to ensure successful completion of work without needless iteration.

Pair programming can be really helpful ensuring higher quality with good speed. It not only reduces bugs from blind spots, also speed up part of the work where the team ended up needing some quick research.

Often these kind of project result in higher stress and low morale. To keep things balanced consider having adequate break between intense work sessions and ensure team mates are well rested.