Estimated development

Entrust tasks estimations  to developers, testers, technical writers and analysts.
Give them chance to estimate tasks that they will implement. Doing in such a way you will be able to plan more carefully (of course after some time during which your guys and girsl will learn to estimate correctly).
After some period of time you will see how they work - slow or fast, lazy or responsible etc. And you will be able to say - "hey, guy, you work too slow and your estimations is so-o-o big. " On the other side, you also can say - "Good job! Really good job! You grow!"

But the pitfall is in the fellows' minds. They can decide that you trust them in all and they can overestimate their work. So check the estimations, especially at first time. And if you see that somebody overestimated his/her job, stop it and talk with he/she.
And if it will continue, estimate the tasks by yourself. So you save your time and prevent dev from saying that he said that he could done the task for X days but manager said him to complete the task for Y hours.

I, for example, trust developer about 2 weeks. I think this time is not critical for most projects. The question is - should we trust from the beginning of the project, or we should set duration of the tasks and only after some time trust our devs.
The controls, of course, is necessary from the early beginning. But of what level of intention and in what form?