How to Overcome Project Bottlenecks and Missed Deadlines

When was the last time your team, or company for that matter, delivered a project or product on time?
 
Sounds like an easy and obvious question to answer however the reality would surprise you.
 
Failure to deliver the goods, on time and to expectation, happens much more than most of us realize.  In fact, we’ve become accustom to our expectations not being met, so much so that we barely even notice it anymore.
 
UPS and FedEx are heralded as two of the best shipping and freight companies globally.  The two combined do more than 24 million daily shipments on average.  That’s a lot of Amazon orders.  Did you know that a combined 19% of those packages don’t make it to their designation on time, or at all?  That’s 4.5 million packages miss the mark, EVERY DAY!
 
You may be thinking, “Why should I care about what happens at FedEx, after all I don’t work there.”
 
Missing deadlines, or delivering the proverbial goods late, is more than just a shipping issue, it’s a global business issue and frankly it’s very bad for business. 
 
When we miss deadlines, or customer expectations for that matter, we experience all sorts of negative exposure, including:

• Other internal projects that get backed up causing a work bottleneck
• increased stress at work
• customers that become irritated or take their business elsewhere
• increased costs to meet original demands
• loss of revenue
• sullying of you or your company’s reputation
• loss of trust within the company or customer

When UPS or FedEx misses a delivery or puts a package back in que which should have already been delivered the ripple effect created for that driver and route can impact an entire days’ worth of work, or more.
 
Same thing can be said for our customers.  We got a call two weeks ago from a customer asking for help on a project of theirs which had already missed its deadline.  Our customer, was two weeks past due on their product delivery date for their respective customer.  Needless to say their customer was less then enthused.  In fact, every day they fell behind in shipping their product they lost 11k USD in billable revenue. 
 
With costs surmounting quickly eating into their profit margin their customer also became wary of their ability to execute as they had hoped and expected.  Phone calls between the two companies became increasingly frequent with the client becoming increasingly upset.  Threats of the white-collar kind became a start to each call.
 
Not a good position to be in. [thanks Captain Obvious]
 
Our customer asked us to bring a team in and offload some of their work, mostly protocol and process related, so they could focus all their efforts in satisfying the commitment they made to their customer.  Our team was to alleviate the bottleneck of work they were experiencing so other internal projects wouldn’t keep backing up as they had already begun to do.  Once the bottleneck begins its incredibly challenging to get out of that rhythm and back on track without extra help.
 
These types of moments are highly intense and stressful.  One of the things our customer did with their end customer, which I found to be of high integrity and good professionalism, is they painstakingly told their customer what had happened to make them fall behind, apologized and took ownership for the failure to deliver and immediately shared with the customer their course of action to solve the problem.  While their customer was rather upset along the way they did acknowledge the apology and things seemed to get underway shortly thereafter.
 
The product ultimately was delivered 3 ½ weeks late of schedule costing our customer close to quarter of a million dollars in missed revenue.  Tough lesson to learn on the importance of hitting deadlines and meeting expectations.
 
Key Take Away:
A wise person once said, “sh** happens”.  A profound statement to say the least yet certainly true.  Sometimes things do happen that are out of our control, taking ownership of the situation and asking for help can be the best two decisions we can make in these moments.
 
Action Item:
Don’t decide to ask for help when you’re already in hot water.  If you’re watching your project timelines begin to slip immediately put in a plan of attack to lean on your suppliers for help.  If your relationship with your customer is on good footing still you can try to proactively ask for an extension on the delivery date with the hopes that will provide some cushion to get work done on time.  Note – don’t get in the habit of asking for deadline extensions.  Once is fine, but to ask that of a customer often signals your company is unorganized and lacks leadership to meet it’s obligations.
 
In need of someone to help you climb out of your project bottlenecks?  Contact Square-1 Engineering at www.square1engineering.com to learn how we can help your solve your biggest engineering and technical business challenges.