What to do when everything is 80% to complete
(and has been for months)
Your projects have been 80% done since the start of Q3 and the team is still spitting out progress reports that say it’s “On Track”. When you push on how the heck it could possibly be “On Track”, they explain to you a myriad of bugs, defects, or new things they had to account for. The client had bulky revisions on it. OR, the client had small revisions, but there was just a LOT of those small revisions.
Before we point fingers at your team, read this entire article.
What causes project delays?
Most teams know ambiguity is the culprit. What they get wrong is how it does the damage. Ambiguity doesn't stop work, it’s the thing that veers the ship off course. Your team keeps moving, at full speed, but either in different directions, or just the plain wrong direction. So it looks like progress right up until final review. Or worse, until it's live.
The obvious response to this is to call it a quality control gap and add some quality control processes. Easy peasy, wash your hands of it, and move on.
Right? Wrong.
Adding extra steps doesn’t solve the issue of ambiguity. It doesn’t make anyone on your team better understand the ask. It actually just punts the unknown further down the road. And punting it further just means the problem became more expensive.
Moving work forward isn’t the same as defining it
Last week, we established that moving work between people is fragile, but usually an easy fix. You build the path, document the handoff, and enable tools to talk to each other.
That clear path only helps if everyone has complete, utter clarity on what they’re supposed to be doing. Hence, where the third step our methodology, Clarify, comes into play. If “done” means one thing to one team member, and something different to someone else, you’re at high risk for delays, errors, and rework. Aka, your project margin is officially at risk.
You capture the work to understand how it moves. You connect the work to get it moving, better. And then you clarify the work to ensure everyone is moving towards the same goal.
The last time two of your teammates disagreed about what was considered “in scope”:
How long did it take to resolve?
Who resolved it?
The Four Most Common Ambiguities
Where are the four places where work goes sideways without shared definitions?
Who owns the work
If two people think they’re responsible for the same step (PMs and AEs often overlap here), it either gets done twice OR each person assumes the other person completed it, so it never gets done.
“I thought (so and so) was doing it”.
What does “done” look like
If your graphic designer thinks the file being sent = done, but your account manager thinks done means the file was sent → approved → checked off in the PM tool, you have a critical disconnect.
Where the scope boundary is
Scope documents define what you agreed to, but we all know, clients love to operate based on what wasn’t excluded😂
This is how we get into the dozens of minor revisions. It seems silly to push back on them in isolation. But when you collectively review resourcing hours on the project, and realize you basically just donated 120 hours at a $65/hr blended rate…we’re willing to bet you weren’t planning on giving away $7800.
Who decides
This is the big one. This is our biggest tip for this entire blog.
Does the person who is the “decider”…do they know they’re the decider? Do they know the turnaround timing expectations?
This is a bottleneck that exists in almost every business. You can have perfected the other three common areas of ambiguities, but if you don’t wrangle this one, you will still feel the pain of delays.
How big is 13 margin points…like actually?
If you’re not a COO or operations-minded person, margin points may not mean a lot to you. Here is it in dollar amounts.
Say you quote a project at $13,500
You planned for 120 hours of delivery time, and that’s including a 25% buffer. Easy in, easy out.
The team on this project has a $65/hr blended rate. So you’re looking at $7,800 in labor and a 42% margin.
Sold.
How did it turn out?
148 hours billed to the project
28 extra hours = $1,820
Labor went. from $7,800 → $9,620
Margin went from 42% to 29%
Now, in isolation, you might be perfectly fine eating that cost. So you let it slip. Let’s say you let it slip for a quarter and you ran eight identical projects. That’s an extra $14,560 line item expense on your quarterly P&L. Oops.
Annually? $58,000.
What does “Good” look like?
“Good” is simple.
Every deliverable has a written definition of done that existed before the work started.
Every step has one owner. ONE.
Ambiguity is protected by an SLA. There's a named decider and a known turnaround, so "we're waiting on a decision" has a deadline attached to it.
Clarify sets the definition and turns a clear path (you created during the “Connect” stage) into a shared destination.
But definitions decay. Within a quarter, a standard nobody's looking at becomes whatever was convenient in the moment, and you're back to three people with three versions of "done." Setting the standard and keeping the standard are two different jobs.
That's Control, and it's the last one, which we’ll cover next week.
In the meantime: pull up the last deliverable that came back more than twice. Write one sentence describing what "done" would have meant on day one.
That sentence is what was missing. And you just wrote it in about ninety seconds, which should tell you something about how expensive the gap was relative to the fix.
