In my early days as Program Manager, I managed a project for one of our main customers. This project had a very tight schedule and I promised to deliver the first EVT samples in 3 months.
It was my responsibility to ensure everything would be completed on time, and achieve the quality standards defined by the program and inside the budget approved by leadership.
Unfortunately… when I started to deep dive into the project and analyze all the technical details, I realized that it was not possible to get the prototypes ready on time. I missed the deadline by 2 weeks. I felt bad at that time because I failed, so I immediately started to work on a new feasible schedule trying to mitigate the problem. In addition, I arranged a daily opening and closing meeting with the core team to monitor all activities. The root cause of the problem was a delay in some component's delivery and I also ignored one of the Reliability tests defined by Engineering.
So I highlighted the problem to my manager and I shared with him my new plan. I explained the situation to him and I shared the new timeline that I could meet. Then we worked together to commit to the new delivery date. So I learned a lot from that situation, now I’m always adding some buffer to my project schedules and I work more closely with core team members. But the most important learning was, how important is to be honest and raise your hand on time if something goes wrong.