Career Success #4: plan your work so that it can get done. This is not ordinarily taught in engineering schools, and it is a big topic. I've taught over 1,000 engineers and scientists how to do this, but it takes a few hours to do it right. Here is just a quick sketch of the basics.
1. Organize the work by product. A good reference for this is here. [If you are looking for a shorter treatment on this, here is a more compact reference.] Be very thorough on this step. Don't forget enabling products as well as deliverables (e.g., you need to create the product "test equipment" in order to get the deliverable product "tested hardware")
2. Assign responsibility for product accomplishment to someone.
3. Have them work out a schedule for completing products. Work out the dependencies (you need to get a fishing rod before you catch a fish, etc.) and you integrate the schedule so that everything is done in a feasible sequence.
4. Finally work out what it costs to do each product, and add some margin so that you can survive the surprises that life will through at you.