The following practices apply to this situation:
After you have made N plans, the boss is always dissatisfied and always wants you to make an earlier plan. Maybe, he just wants to put more pressure on you and let you finish it earlier. If the boss (or your superiors) doesn't tell you when he wants to finish it, it doesn't tell you why he wants it earlier or what he really wants. If he can tell you about deadline, you may tell him what you can do during this time; if he tells you why he wants to finish it earlier, maybe you can provide him with some solutions. However, you don't get anything. What you get is one sentence: Can you do it earlier?
1. Ask the boss (or your superiors) the following questions: Do you want a shorter plan or a longer-term plan? Should we invest more people or fewer people? Can some feature be reduced? First, you should know from the boss what is more important. It will allow you to make better judgments and provide possible solutions, or prepare for resources to be obtained from the boss.
2. Find out the reason the boss wants to finish the job in a shorter time. Is this project of great strategic significance? How can this be regarded as a success?
3. Make sure that your boss understands the solution you provided and that he knows why you provided it. Maybe he has a faster and easier way to complete the project.
4. Explain to the boss how much confidence you have in the solution you provided. Maybe the boss doesn't understand what your evaluation means, maybe you don't know what they really want.
5. Tell the boss what your deliverables are when you provide deadline, in this way, you can ask your boss what kind of standards the final deliverables will meet (Can you set this features to the extreme and ignore the features? How many bugs can be found? ).
If this happens frequently in your project, we recommend that you use the following policies:
1. Develop an unfinished work list with priority
2. developed based on feature. The more detailed progress the boss sees, the less time it will be entangled in.
3. Use a short timebox (less than four weeks) so that your boss can see the progress of the project. If you can give the boss some features every few weeks, the time will seem a little less important. You will start to discuss the feature, the time, the standard, and so on.
In fact, the reason why our boss constantly requires an earlier time is mostly to leave more buffer for the project for emergency purposes. This is essentially a lack of trust in the project manager and the project team. This kind of distrust may be more likely to happen to the newly established project team because everyone has never cooperated. What we can do is implement by feature, so that the boss can continuously see the progress of the project and will not be entangled in time. When the project team is mature and stable, it establishes a trust relationship with the boss, and I believe this kind of thing will become fewer and fewer.
