Accepting Unrealistic Deadlines: A Recipe for Disaster

Muhammad Umais Mulki is a senior project manager with more than 10 years of professional services experience in various leadership positions. He has extensive experience managing projects from the initiation phase to closure, and has worked on defining scopes of large-scale IT projects, establishing budgets, developing timelines, scheduling deliverables, preparing project charters and plans, building teams, defining roles, managing resources, evaluating and managing risks, managing engagements and expectations, tracking progress and delivering desired results. He is a certified PMP and holds master's degrees in MIS, Marketing and Management Sciences.

  Communications Management   CRM   New Practitioners   Schedule Management   Scheduling   Scope Management   Stakeholder Management  

Abstract
In today’s cut-throat competition, one of the common mistakes that project managers—along with their business development counterparts—make is to accept unrealistic project deadlines dictated by the clients. The intention on agreeing to such deadlines is to secure the business and then somehow try to fit the delivery of the project within the committed time frame or hope to bargain for more time with the client during project execution.

In some cases, things turn in favor of the project managers and they succeed in delivering the project whilst managing the clients’ expectations; but in most cases, it’s a disaster recipe that is also in contradiction to the project managers’ code of ethics.

As project management practitioners, all PMs are committed to doing what is right and honorable; they need to fulfill the commitments that they have undertaken. However, sometimes the temptation to work on an exciting project—and other times the pressure from the business executives to get the business—leads to agreement on unrealistic expectations. This article discusses the mistake of agreeing to unrealistic timelines and suggests a few ways on how this can be avoided—and the project kept under reasonable control.

Introduction
The other day I was reading an article on the top five reasons for project failure, and one…

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