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Comment by munirusman | Hacker News Reader

The key is to divide your milestones in very small tasks in hours and communicate this detailed hourly plan with your total estimate. Update your manager/client about your progress as frequently as possible. Twice a week if not daily.

During the project, if you realize that your estimates were originally wrong, fix it asap and communicate immediately. Frequent communication is the key.

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How do you account for the hours you spend "communicating", and will there be hours left for real work?

It doesn't take much time if we use right tools. I've found Asana really good for task management with your team. As software dev, all you have to do is to tick completed tasks or write short comment if you are missing deadline for an individual tasks.

Also, committing code multiple times a day with meaningful comments also helps.

Any advice for easily communicating with non-technical clients who wouldn't use technical tools?

I have faced many non-technical clients in past and trust me it's not easy. The best thing I could do is to double (sometimes triple) the original estimated timelines.

Make separate milestones for QA and UAT rounds.

Breaking the project in very small but presentable milestones helps in keeping non-technical clients updated and happy.

This is horrible advice.

Why? Can you elaborate on why you feel that way and what you feel would be better advice?

I'm guessing the negative comment refers to "communicate this detailed hourly plan with your total estimate"

Providing an hourly schedule for a project as short as a week sounds completely crazy to me. Imagine how to pull that off for a month+ project. Maybe the sentence was phrased poorly.

Because sometimes it's a small task with a small time estimate that balloons out of proportion. You look sillier when your one day task balloons to five days, rather than your 10 day bundle of tasks balloons to 15, because a third-party library is poorly document and doesn't do what it claims to do in your specific context. Splitting the tasks doesn't make then go by faster.

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