If you were given a project deadline and limited resources, how would you complete the project successfully?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

When a project comes with stringent timelines and limited resources, we should
keep the following pointers in mind.
1. Business impact: Firstly we need to understand how the business will be
impacted by this feature and set the priority of the program accordingly with
all the stakeholders involved.
2. Program tracking: Considering the criticality of the program, the execution
should be monitored closely, to reduce any bottle neck situation and fix issues
in a lower TAT.
3. Appraise the Stakeholders: Send out program status reports on a daily basis
to appraise the stakeholders of the status, any critical blockers that would
require immediate attention.
4. Limited changes to scope: Avoid any critical change to the scope, to mitigate
derailment from the aligned plan.
5. Peer to Peer programming: Instead of following scrum based approach, we can
utilize the extreme program approach of the agile methodology. This will allow a
lot of the execution phase deliverables (like development, component testing,
etc) to happen in parallel and help in better management of the timelines.
6. Plan B: Have an alignment for backup resources, in case there are unplanned
leaves within the existing team.

Anonymous · Answer

Must define what is the scope of project, have a clear and useful gantt chart,
allocate member to do multiple task without impact to critical path

Anonymous · Answer

Align on clear requirements, identify dependencies and stakeholders, secure
partner commits, track burndown, unblock teams, maintain risk inventory and key
decision logs. Trade off between resource, time or scope. Example, we wanted to
deliver for a pilot milestone with a hard deadline. The level of effort for the
P0 requirements was very high requiring 4 SDEs for 3 sprints but we had only 2
SDE resources to work with. We revised and reprioritized the P0s with our
product manager and delivered for the pilot in time.

If you were given a project deadline and limited resources, how would you complete the project successfully?

Answers