Respectful Leadership
The only way to know if your project is on time is to dig deep into the details and discover the unknowns before they ambush you.
But even then, you are subject to the whims of completely random events so must engage in a certain amount of “disaster planning.”
I've previously written about Sonia Bramwell, the best project manager I've worked with over the last 20 years. We first worked at Sherman's Travel in 2011, and it was there that I first saw her technique: to push for details, and then push for even more details, and then push for even more details.
For 10 years Shermans Travel had leased 24 web servers in a local data center, but the decision was made that we would not renew the contract in April of 2012. We would move to AWS instead.
The existing PHP code was a complete disaster and could not be rescued, therefore we would re-write all our code as a Ruby On Rails app, plus 6 small Sinatra apps to handle certain specialty use cases, such as sending out the travel newsletter, and the interactive videos, which were the main source of revenue for the company.
