To manage development time, maintain a concise and up-to-date project plan. A project plan is an estimate, a schedule, a set of milestones for marking progress, and an assignment of your team or your own time to each task on the estimate. It should also include other things you have to remember to do, such as meeting with the quality assurance people, preparing documentation, or ordering equipment. If you are on a team, the project plan should be a consensual agreement, both at the start and as you go.
The project plan exists to help make decisions, not to show how organized you are. If the project plan is either too long or not up-to-date, it will be useless for making decisions. In reality, these decisions are about individual persons. The plan and your judgment let you decide if you should shift tasks from one person to another. The milestones mark your progress. If you use a fancy project planning tool, do not be seduced into creating a Big Design Up Front (BDUF) for the project, but use it maintain concision and up-to-dateness.
If you miss a milestone, you should take immediate action such as informing your boss that the scheduled completion of that project has slipped by that amount. The estimate and schedule could never have been perfect to begin with; this creates the illusion that you might be able to make up the days you missed in the latter part of the project. You might. But it is just as likely that you have underestimated that part as that you have overestimated it. Therefore the scheduled completion of the project has already slipped, whether you like it or not.
Make sure your plan includes time for: internal team meetings, demos, documentation, scheduled periodic activities, integration testing, dealing with outsiders, sickness, vacations, maintenance of existing products, and maintenance of the development environment. The project plan can serve as a way to give outsiders or your boss a view into what you or your team is doing. For this reason it should be short and up-to-date.
A project often depends on software produced by organizations that it does not control. There are great risks associated with third party software that must be recognized by everyone involved.
Never, ever, rest any hopes on vapor. Vapor is any alleged software that has been promised but is not yet available. This is the surest way to go out of business. It is unwise to be merely skeptical of a software company's promise to release a certain product with a certain feature at a certain date; it is far wiser to ignore it completely and forget you ever heard it. Never let it be written down in any documents used by your company.
If third-party software is not vapor, it is still risky, but at least it is a risk that can be tackled. If you are considering using third-party software, you should devote energy early on to evaluating it. People might not like to hear that it will take two weeks or two months to evaluate each of three products for suitability, but it has to be done as early as possible. The cost of integrating cannot be accurately estimated without a proper evaluation.
Understanding the suitability of existing third party software for a particular purpose is very tribal knowledge. It is very subjective and generally resides in experts. You can save a lot of time if you can find those experts. Often times a project will depend on a third-party software system so completely that if the integration fails the project will fail. Express risks like that clearly in writing in the schedule. Try to have a contingency plan, such as another system that can be used or the ability to write the functionality yourself if the risk can't be removed early. Never let a schedule depend on vapor.
Use consultants, but don't rely on them. They are wonderful people and deserve a great deal of respect. Since they get to see a lot of different projects, they often know more about specific technologies and even programming techniques than you will. The best way to use them is as educators in-house that can teach by example.
However, they usually cannot become part of the team in the same sense that regular employees are, if only because you may not have enough time to learn their strengths and weaknesses. Their financial commitment is much lower. They can move more easily. They may have less to gain if the company does well. Some will be good, some will be average, and some will be bad, but hopefully your selection of consultants will not be as careful as your selection of employees, so you will get more bad ones.
If consultants are going to write code, you must review it carefully as you go along. You cannot get to the end of the a project with the risk of a large block of code that has not been reviewed. This is true of all team members, really, but you will usually have more knowledge of the team members closer to you.
Carefully consider the cost of a meeting; it costs its duration multiplied by the number of participants. Meetings are sometimes necessary, but smaller is usually better. The quality of communication in small meetings is better, and less time overall is wasted. If any one person is bored at a meeting, take this as a sign that the meeting should be smaller.
Everything possible should be done to encourage informal communication. More useful work is done during lunches with colleagues than during any other time. It is a shame that more companies do not recognize nor support this fact.
Disagreement is a great opportunity to make a good decision, but it should be handled delicately. Hopefully you feel that you have expressed your thoughts adequately and been heard before the decision is made. In that case there is nothing more to say, and you should decide whether you will stand behind the decision even though you disagree with it. If you can support this decision even though you disagree, say so. This shows how valuable you are because you are independent and are not a yes-man, but respectful of the decision and a team player.
Sometimes a decision that you disagree with will be made when the decision makers did not have the full benefit of you opinion. You should then evaluate whether to raise the issue on the basis of the benefit to the company or tribe. If it is a small mistake in your opinion, it may not be worth reconsidering. If it is a large mistake in you opinion, then of course you must present an argument.
Usually, this is not a problem. In some stressful circumstances and with some personality types this can lead to things being taken personally. For instance, some very good programmers lack the confidence needed to challenge a decision even when they have good reason to believe it is wrong. In the worst of circumstances the decision maker is insecure and takes it as a personal challenge to their authority. It is best to remember that in such circumstances people react with the reptilian part of their brains. You should present your argument in private, and try to show how new knowledge changes the basis on which the decision was made.
Whether the decision is reversed or not, you must remember that you will never be able to say ‘I told you so!’ since the alternate decision was never fully explored.