When I started to as PM in China, I was responsible for managing a Project for an important customer. After few days in charge of this program, the Engineering Manager provided feedback that my Project schedule was not feasible based on the testing requirements defined by his team. This automatically delayed the first EVT delivery.
Then, immediately asked for a meeting with the Engineering team to get more specific feedback and understand what was missing in my schedule, what were the technical requirements and why these testing was so important.
I took the inputs and spent some time analyzing in detail all technical requirements, reviewing with different core team members all activities Lead Times, dependences between tasks and looking at other projects data to identify patterns.
With all these inputs, I created a new plan. I coordinated a daily opening and closing meetings with the core team to monitor activities and prevent task duplication between cross-functional teams. I also highlighted the issue to my manager and explained him the root cause of the problem, and the new plan. Together we informed our customer about the delay and kept working together to reach the new committed schedule.
Finally, we delivered the EVT units to our customer according to the new schedule. My manager also acknowledged the effort to enhance the customer satisfaction, and the experience showed me the importance of being honest and proactive in communication. From this day I also keep 2 weeks of buffer in my programs schedule