Divide and conquer
Posted by Amol Chaudhari on September 28, 2008
Sometimes i just love to do a few things at my own. Though its a good thing, at the workplace it frequently causes problems. A few days back, once again i was a victim of my own habit..
We had a release that day. And I had some work to finish up as it was needed to go in that release. Though trivial, i had to make changes to all the screens of the application currently i was working on. I thought i would be able to finish it up in some 5-6 hours and will have enough time to test it too. So i decided to do all the things myself instead of delegating some of the work to my colleagues. But it took me much more time than what i had estimated. And the entire team stayed in office till late night to ensure that the release goes smoothly.
Our client also scolded me for not informing him in time that we will not be able to finish up the things.
Though we managed to do the release on the same day, i had a few hard lessons to learn from.
1. When you have a tight schedule always try to divide the work into pieces and delegate those individual pieces within your team.
2. Always keep aside a couple of hours as a cover as some tasks may take more time than what was estimated.
