Are we all in on the farce?

When you’re proposing a project and the prospective client wants deliverables attached to deadlines, does everyone know it’s pretty much bullshit?

I’m picking dates out of the clear blue sky. They’re as fictional as what the Jetsons thought the future looked like.

Because 95% of projects do not go according to plan. How could they? There are just so many unknowns.

Well, to be honest, the one thing I do know for sure is that the client will not get me feedback on the draft deliverables in a timely manner. It doesn’t matter who they are or how much I like them or how good the intentions are or how much we all want the project to succeed.

It just doesn’t happen.

I shouldn’t be so hyperbolic. I do get timely feedback once in a while – and it invariably comes with requests to undo things they previously asked me to do.

Either way, we will not meet the deadline.

Early Founder Stephanie was such a people pleaser that I’d let clients trample my boundaries and timelines and mental health. Old Me would have pulled some late nights and early mornings turning these large requests into miracles before the deadline.

Which we all knew was arbitrary in the first place.

How can we handle a schedule overrun while also maintaining our sanity?

When this happened last year, my team and I could see a schedule overrun early on.

Red Flag: If your project involves data collection. Even if that’s just a matter of scraping existing data from online sources. You will overrun the schedule.

Communicate early. I began telling the client “I need x by y date in order to stay on track for this project.”

Communicate often. Though they said they understood, they also blew past the dates I had put in place. Every single time. I changed my messaging to “We’ll do our best to get as far as possible in the time we have but I’m giving you a heads up right now that it’s likely we won’t make the deadline we stated in the contract.” I said a version of that so many times that it came as no surprise when the deadline was in the rearview mirror.

Then a wrecking ball hit our timeline: My point-of-contact took a new job. We switched horses mid-stream. New horse asked for us to undo things the last horse asked us to do. This set us back a month. My first two strategies to prevent an overrun were moot.

Communicate clearly. This is the point where my team and I could see that deadline was gonna crash into deadline and the whole project would spill over past the contract’s end date.

Option A was to stress out my team with demands to push harder and just make it happen. But who wants to live that life??

Option B was to work with the client to extend the end date on the contract and overlap the end of this project with the start of new projects we had on the horizon. In some cases, my team had, months earlier when the sky was bluer, told other clients they couldn’t begin work until another project (this one) ended and had promised start dates that were now looming. Extending this end date would still create a stressful scramble.

Ok there may be 23 more options but I chose Option C, which was “It’s no one’s fault in particular but we are unfortunately so far behind the schedule at this point that we won’t make our contract’s end date. My team and I have obligated time in our schedules through the end of the original contract period and we won’t be available after that date. We can work together to hand off the project to you to wrap up. If you still need our input, we can consult on an hourly basis starting in October.”

I mustered up my courage, did 10 jumping jacks, and hit send on that message.

They understood. They appreciated the plan for a hand-off. And they asked for an hourly contract to start in October.

Or, at least, that’s what the email said. For all I know, they were cursing my name back at their office. And it was that reaction I was actually afraid of. I didn’t want to make my clients mad at me.

Remnants of that old People Pleasing Stephanie were still kicking around.

The rational part of me knew that the clients were the ones who ignored the timeline. This wasn’t on me or my team. Yet that logic couldn’t quiet the fear of someone being mad at me. You can’t logic an emotion.

You know what worked?

When I realized that the choice was between taking the risk that my clients would be at me and being absolutely sure I would be mad at myself for allowing a stressful work culture that required multiple all nighters to make up for other people’s errors.

I’m still people pleasing. I’m just counting me and my team as people, too.