How to manage a project when the boss is the bottleneck
Unapproved designs and micromanaged sign-offs stall timelines while urgent tasks crowd out secondary work, making standard scheduling tools ineffective. Trying to track these hidden bottlenecks in a Gantt chart fails because the actual delays stem from waiting on executive approval rather than task volume.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1validating the delivery plan during the contracting/pre-mobilisation periodDid this help you?
- 2mapping dependencies in scheduling softwareDid this help you?
- 3asking experienced peers for adviceDid this help you?
- 4Keeping separate Gantt charts and continually readjusting them to show rolling delaysDid this help you?
- 5Meshing multiple projects into one larger master scheduleDid this help you?
- 6Modelling bottlenecks and competing resource drains directly into the project timeline tasksDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“What would you do in this scenario? Keep readjusting your individual Gantt for each project to show delays or do them all in one and probably be closer to target? I’m not sure.”source ↗
“Project “a” taking so much priority that they would stop working in b and c and work on them sparingly and because my manager has to do the approval of designs and all details.”source ↗
“I’m concerned how we can deliver on time, in scope and without going over the budget and going insane 🤣”source ↗
“the reason your dates keep slipping is not the number of charts. It is that the two things eating your timeline are not on the timeline.”source ↗
“Honestly sometimes what sucks is that resources are available and ready to go but because the manager who does all approvals is the major bottleneck”source ↗
Where this came up
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