What is the thin line between being challenged, and being overwhelmed? Or, more appropriately, where is it?
This is something that people struggle with all the time. I have to remind myself: feeling overwhelmed is temporary.
As seasoned programmers, we are blessed with tools that help us manage large tasks. Experience tells us to take a large problem and break it down into smaller, doable pieces. It also tells us what to use, because we’ve seen someone else do it, or had a conversation with a peer or boss that knows a thing or two about project management.
As young programmers, we are often at the behest of the whims of those above us in the organizational hierarchy.
In the agency world, you’re often handed large tasks, and sometimes you’re not given a rudder. Sometimes you’re surrounded by account people, designers, company owners, even programmers that are possibly on your level or slightly higher, but you’re not given the additional blessing of someone that knows how to manage a project from a technical level. Maybe the people who handed you the project don’t even care about managing it properly. And when I say care, I don’t mean caring enough to pay the idea of technical project management some lip service, then turn their concerns to something else. Maybe their philosophy is : “Hey you’re the tech person. Just get it done. Do the thing with the keyboards and characters and the servers”.
My heart goes out to young programmers everywhere, especially those that are currently living in that situation. I was in there before. I worked at a small agency for a number of years that focused primarily on print design, but kinda recognized that the whole internet was kinda blowing up into a big deal. So, by necessity, they had people on staff to make web sites. When I left that company, they were mired in developing a website for a company that was already about two months behind delivery. About six months later, they were still working on it, and one of the people inside the company estimated it would be another year before final delivery. The ambitions of the site were beyond the scope of the managerial competence.
Here’s what I can offer to you, if that sounds like it could happen to you: A spreadsheet. Really?
Yes. I’m lucky to work somewhere that embraces a more involved development tracking process, but for smaller projects, or organizations with no semblance of tech process? Take a spreadsheet, break the tasks down into small, manageable parts, give them conditional formatting based upon Status (Ready, Open, Done) and estimates. Sometimes I’ll make two time-related columns, Estimated vs Actual so I review the wild inaccuracies of my initial estimates.
But that’s really it. And then mow through the list. Watch out for entropy as well, you’d probably do well to review it at the start of each week to add / remove items and cleanup. If the project exceeds more than a few weeks in timeline, you actually need to push for better system than this, and that means you also need the support of the other people in the organization to get that system implemented and upheld. But that’s another post entirely.
