I have a designer, a remote front end developer, a remote back end developer and a remote full stack.
When I estimate timelines I decide the tasks throw them into some gantt software set reasonable times depending on what task is then organize the tasks so that when 1 person is waiting for something, something else is being done. I also take into account that there are some areas guys know better, and so might take slightly longer if I give it to the full stack dev rather than the back end dev for example.
Product and sales will start trying to optimize things; what if we do this first. What are the dependencies here, maybe if we do this instead, we can defer this decision until later because the work for both of these features is the same.
Everyone assumes that because I have done 1 set of planning, I know how long it will take if the ordering is all changed. I think this would be entirely possible if I planned features as blocks, and accepted that some people will be underutilized for periods and thus I should expect overall delivery to take longer but then I am sacrificing costs and time for the sake of being able to explain things.
Additionally my view of the planning involves about 100 tasks, compared to theirs which are high level items. So as you can imagine, moving things about is time consuming and it isn't always obvious to me that doing task 35 after task 85 is going to cause some issue.
Is it better for me to just plan things in a way that it can all be reorganized for these types of discussions. Should I expect to make 3+ plans and present them all as options? Or is there some better way to deal with this.