Damage Control when You Miss a Deadline at Work

You planned carefully. You completed tasks under your control on time or even ahead of the game. You did everything you knew to do. But in spite of all your hard work, effort and planning, something went wrong.

Now, that critical project at work may not be finished on deadline.

When you're working under a tight deadline, many things can go wrong and throw off your timeline. Computer systems fail. An error gets caught a little too late. Someone on the project team doesn't complete their part of the puzzle on time. A critical team member quits or gets sick. A vendor doesn't come through with required materials or services, or someone in management changes the projects specs at the last minute.

Whether you're a project manager or a member of the team, facing the possibility of a missed deadline is disappointing, stressful and downright scary. Depending on the situation, it can also have serious ramifications for your career or future assignments.

While the outcome may not be pretty no matter what you do next, there are steps you can take to minimize the pain. By controlling expectations, communicating with your boss and others who will be impacted, and avoiding letting your team disintegrate due to finger-pointing and blame-laying, you can control the damage, finish the project, and move on with lessons learned from an experience you'd rather have avoided altogether.

Control expectations ahead of time

Deadlines can be one of those situations where lying, or at least stretching the truth a little, is acceptable. One of the best ways to control fallout from a deadline being missed it to make sure the external community doesn't even know it happened.

Generally, project planning works one of two ways. In the best case scenario, you're setting a deadline based on how long you think it will take to complete all required work. Your project teams maps out each task that will need to be completed and how long each step will take, and then assigns a deadline to the project based on that assessment.