Do You Habitually Over-Commit On Delivery Dates And Performance Levels?

 

You may pride yourself on setting tight schedules and high performance levels, but have you looked at what it has done to your life? Targets that are unrealistically high with unreal schedules wreak havoc on the people who are expected to deliver the products or services,

You may not think of yourself as being unrealistic, but how do you feel about your work schedule? Are you constantly working to keep up or are you doing great work and still having time for a family or personal life?

If you are always under the gun as far as work schedules, it is possible that you are doing something wrong. If a project is carefully planned, the outcome should be a working system or product delivered in a timely manner.

When the schedule is arbitrarily decided on a management whim rather than on solid experience, the product quality generally suffers. As the scheduled end date nears, features are dropped from the product so that the delivery date will be met. When management provides bonuses for meeting delivery dates, product quality inevitably suffers. Key features are left untested or omitted and the project is turned over to Customer Service personnel for delivery and patching in the field. When that happens, you get a delivery that isn’t a delivery because it is a protracted repair and patch job in the field.

With Spiritual Rescue Technology it is quite easy to predict this kind of behavior and to remedy it so that it does not continue to occur. No one in their right mind would commit to a schedule or a specification that they could not meet, but in the presence of overwhelming demands, it becomes easy to lose sight of the penalties for misrepresenting your ability to deliver.

Adding to the sense of urgency are worries that someone else will get the order if you don’t step up to the challenge and close the deal. I am quite familiar with this kind of pressure as I spent many years working 60-70 hour weeks so I would be first in line for the next big project. I had no idea what was driving me at the time, but my family life suffered because of my work schedules.

With SRT it is fairly easy to locate the source of the tendency to overcommit. It is almost always spiritual in nature and comes from earlier failures to deliver on your part or on the part of others. You will experience it as a counter-intention to telling the customer what the project will take in terms of time and resources. There will be fears of loss of prestige or income if you tell the customer what the job will take. These fears undermine your resolution to be truthful and you end up compromising your integrity. Now you have promised something that you do not actually believe you can deliver and your torment begins. You take it out on yourself by working extra hours and making excuses when you consistently fail to meet the customer’s expectations which you set.

With SRT, you locate and remove the impulses to stretch the truth and you operate from a position of certainty. Once you have established your certainty, you can work with the customer to give them certainty and a realistic appraisal of the risks involved. You also give yourself the ability to move the goalposts for the project as it becomes evident that vital steps are taking longer than expected.

When you are working from realistic estimates, you are able to see when partial deliveries are possible so that you can have additional time to complete the final requirements. Your schedules are predictable and when changes are required, they can be anticipated well in advance.

The secret is to locate all of the sources of upset and counter-intention before making commitments to a customer, then you will be able to negotiate from strength. If your proposal does not meet the customer’s needs you will be able to discuss changes intelligently and propose alternative solutions. If your solutions are not acceptable to the customer, you will be able to end off knowing that you have provided the best solution that would work for your benefit.

If you have handled all of the counter-intention on your side, you will have made the best offer you could make. If the prospective customer is looking for more then you can provide, you are better off without that business.

When you know what you can provide and how long it takes to do things, there is no good reason to commit to doing more unless there is a suitable financial reward. There are businesses that routinely do rush jobs, but they are structured for this activity and charge accordingly. There is a personal cost for this type of activity, and I am not prepared to discuss it here, other than to say that this kind of rush business is hard on the individuals involved.

Those of you who pride yourselves on your special abilities should take a good look at work situations where stress is the normal mode of operation. Stress is never a good addition to the work scene. It usually means that there is a lack of fairness involved and important data is being hidden.

This entry was posted in Achieving Peace of Mind, Learning new skills, Possibly Helpful Advice. Bookmark the permalink.

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