torkell | Accidental project management (Reply)

Oh dear, I seem to have become something of a project lead at work.

It all started innocently enough - we're trying to finish a particular project, and there's one application involved that I've done a lot of work with. So naturally when it comes to estimating the remaining work the spotlight falls on me for that application, and as part of that I went through the outstanding tasks and did ballpark estimates for each one.

Then the actual project lead wanted to try and do weekly sprints to track how well we're doing at meeting the due date. Since I'd already worked out which issues needed to be done, I went through my list and started scheduling them for the next few weeks. Including working out which issues depended on other work being done first and so which issues form the critical path.

Then to speed things up another person got allocated to the same bit of software, and the actual project lead asked me to allocate them issues to work on. So I'm now also working out which issues can be done in parallel and which will conflict horribly... and assigning work and monitoring progress.

Somehow I've ended up doing quite a bit of project management for something which technically isn't my project!