A good project manager doubles your number an adds 20% anyway.
Triples it if you are working more than one project.!
A typical project manager will get a range, take the lower bound and communicate it as the only relevant number to every other stakeholder. When that inevitably does not work out, all the blame will be passed on to you unfiltered.
Depending on where you work it may or may not be worth giving someone new the benefit of the doubt, but in general it is safer to only ever talk about the upper bound and add some padding.
I have a friend who’s a new PM (in scaled agile). He isn’t up on expectation management.
We have a process where we request data from another agency which takes “from 7 seconds to 12 days”
And of course he tells people that. And of course they hear “7 seconds”
I have told him that if the SLA is 12 days, say “less than 12 days”
My teams new hire project manager was even more advanced. When they found out we were working on 5-10 projects at once with no PM, they quit.
We had 3 PMs when I started here, and have been down to 0-1 for 6 months. That 0-1 runs a whole unrelated team, but is technical still a PM.
Dysfunction is fun. The plus side? No one asks me for estimates.
