@paul_ipv6 posted about #project managers, fanciful #schedules, and his response involving a Magic 8-Ball. It reminded me of a story I've told about one place I worked. I've never told it here.
I was working at a small-to-medium-sized IT/#software company that had a few internal products, but mostly did outsourced R&D work for a behemoth company - one of the largest on the planet at the time.
It was classic #waterfall planning. HugeCo's R&D department would send us a high-level #spec.
Our #president and the #VP of #engineering would break our company's share of the work into #blocks or #modules, those would flow out to individual #team leads. Teams would break it down into tasks, and then come up with #estimates for each #task. There would be hundreds of tickets overall; projects generally lasted 6 months to a year.
Then the president and VP would go into the #boardroom with hundreds of these tasks on #PostIt notes and #stick them all over 3 #walls.
Our pres & VP would go back in the boardroom, and start going over all the #tickets on the critical path. They'd just #arbitrarily#chop the #estimates - this 8 becomes a 3, that 15 becomes a 4, on and on all along the critical path. Sometimes they would have to make multiple passes to get the answer they wanted.
Eventually, they would reach a state where the final ticket on the critical path had a completion date of 31 March.