It’s been a growing trend in the last years, aircraft completion centers marketing the project they completed was completed ahead of schedule.
You see it written in articles about aircraft successful completed early and returned to their owners.
How many of these completion centers over promised and under delivered? More importantly how many under promised and the over delivered?
It’s not just limited to the completion center; suppliers, contractors, individuals in the completions project team – even the project manager!
But as a client-side program manager when I hear that someone “under promised and over delivered there’s only one thought that comes to mind.
Under-promising is another word for “lying”.
There is skill and effort that is input to build an accurate and rigid project plan, only for a strategic supplier or someone in the project team to know that they over-egged their part of the estimated cost or duration so that they wouldn’t fail and could make themselves or their organization look great.
That’s amateur hour.
This happened: “I can be done in six months”. And then they finished it in four. I am not always impressed.
Instead we needed to re-plan, I was disappointed for entire two months.
Had I known this upfront and their estimate been more realistic we could have placed purchase orders earlier and brought forward other work to start earlier – and in-turn gained greater overall project efficiencies and an even happier client.
In life we feel great when projects are delivered to plan.
Late or early is associated with a binary feeling.
We think that early is great, and late is bad.
Late is bad, but so sometimes is early.
Because the individual or company didn’t fully show up when the completion center was planning its work.
So now the individual or company finished early and the completion center has to re-plan the work or lose some efficiency.
Complex projects like aircraft completions contain multiple dependencies – all requiring careful and meticulous planning to get the timing to work – for good cost, schedule and resource control – to gain the important efficiencies we desire in projects. Get this right and deliver to quality, and it results in a great reputation.
Whenever I gain a new client, I provide my “promise” to over deliver and they act with surprise: “Really?” and because of that they’d hire me.
And THEN I’d over deliver. Gives me two chances to amaze them and then they are a client for life.
And I’d surprise them with the truth.
The gift of truth is rare. People will treasure it and try to return that gift.
I try to do this in every area of my life.
Sometimes it doesn’t work but I try.
So what if the completion center or suppliers over promised – and then over delivered. Wouldn’t that delight customers?
How that news would spread in the world of custom aircraft completion.
They’d be stacked out with work.
Showing up is what we need to do every day – to deliver in full to the best of our abilities, as part of a project and a business that delivers successful customer outcomes.
That’s where we should all strive to be.