Asking b/c I've taken two courses in dev process or project management in my academic career, and neither provided substantial value or benefit to how I've lead projects professionally.
However, there were techniques (like critical path analysis) that as I've got more senior, started working at larger companies, and started stepping down the senior leadership path, I've started to see some applicability to. Not direct applications - they still need taking with a massive pinch of salt, and modifying for modern learnings in industry, but they do start to provide some value, even if it's just learning what the grey-hairs in the exec are used to seeing :)
Lots of other old school stuff that we "just turning grey" people need to translate for the new kids.
Realistic estimates aren't padded, but they still have significant probability of being inaccurate. After all, they're estimates, not information from the future transmitted to the past.
I can't talk in too much detail, but in general, the deadline date was fixed through commercial contracts signed at a high enough level that engineering didn't have sight of them. The concept and commercial case was sound, but the implementation hadn't been worked out yet, when a date was set.
My strong preference would be for estimation to come first, of course, before a deadline is picked (and even then, only picked if it is really a necessary deadline), which is then based on reality, and also include some slack for unintended discoveries.
I delivered a spreadsheet with detailed information of how long it would take to develop each feature of the new module they wanted. It totalled around 3 months of development.
Fancy suit folks told me 3 months wouldn't do because sales promised it would be ready in 2 months. Then I was asked where could shortcuts be taken.
In the end we had to cut features that will certainly upset our client given their initial expectation.
How do you incentivise devs to hit those timeframes?
Hope you're doing well too!
Once the project is ongoing and you'll need to account for changes, I've either done it manually (which takes an age) or handed it off to PM's to oversee using either MS Project, airtable with a custom-authored set of actions/etc, or PrimaVera.