It’s commonly said that you should under-promise and over-deliver. It starts with the promise. Never submit a budget that you can’t hit. Never promise a date that you can’t meet. Never commit to something you know cannot be done.
The earliest opportunity you have to drive success is at the beginning. Think of a project where everything is delivered in six months for a million dollars. If everyone thought you could do it in four months for five hundred thousand dollars, you look like you failed. But if they thought it would take seven months and cost a bit more than a million, you look like a winner. Often, the difference is in developing a realistic expectation of “what is good.”
Defining what good looks like is the single biggest thing you can do to ensure your success. If every one of your project sponsors has a different expectation for what you are trying to achieve, you likely cannot meet all of their combined objectives regardless of the outcome you create. However, if you set appropriate expectations up front, they may be temporarily disappointed but they will have a realistic picture of what they will get.
There’s a catch to this. You cannot under-promise to such a degree that it is plainly obvious that you sandbagged the project. If you promise a year but deliver in a month, you simply look like you didn’t know what was going to happen. If you ask for a million dollars but only need 10% of that, you look like you didn’t know what you were doing. Being off by 90%, even to the positive, loses you credibility even more than being off by 10% to the bad side.
All of this is about credibility. Do you know what you are doing and can you run a project to the right outcomes? You have to start with realism.