Meeting Deadlines: 8 Expert Tactics for Consistent Success

Meeting deadlines, delivering projects on time, and consistently impressing clients is every project manager’s dream.

Sadly, it’s not every project manager’s reality, especially when working on multiple projects. So, if you’re struggling to please your clients and prevent setbacks, you’re definitely not alone.

But, with preparation and proper mitigation strategies, you can increase your chances of success. Consider this text your actionable guide for minimizing delays and optimizing the chances of meeting deadlines at work.

1. Specify project deliverables

The first step on the road to meeting your set deadlines is to:

• Understand the goals of the project, and 
• Specify the main deliverables you need to create to achieve those goals.

To define project deliverables and goals, speak with your key stakeholders and understand their needs and expectations. 

A clear understanding of what it is your stakeholders want is the foundation for all your future work. Get it wrong, and, at best, you’ll be forced to backtrack and redo a portion of the work, wasting your time and money in the process. At worst, you’ll lose your client and damage your reputation. 

So, make sure to get it right.

2. Split work into smaller tasks

Once you have your deliverables sorted out, define the work needed to complete them and then break it down into smaller tasks.

Not only will this make the work appear more manageable, but it will also make it easier to allocate project resources and create a more accurate estimate of the amount of time needed to complete the work.

Make sure to provide clear instructions for tasks, assign deadlines, and entrust them to relevant team members, taking care to distribute the workload evenly.

3. Create a project timeline

With your work laid out before you, you can now proceed to make time estimates for each task and create a project timeline, complete with all the major milestones and due dates.

The easiest way to create a timeline is to use a Gantt chart. Gantt charts help visualize the duration of the work and serve as excellent guides for organizing the workload and creating a detailed schedule.

When creating a timeline, make sure to leave some buffer room for each milestone to account for any surprises that might cause delays.

4. Prioritize tasks

Not all tasks carry equal weight. The success and timely delivery of your projects will depend on your ability to effectively prioritize tasks.

In most cases, you’ll be able to identify the minimal viable product (MVP) that will satisfy your stakeholders. All tasks that bring you closer to creating the MVP are must-have tasks and should go on the priority list.

For all intents and purposes, all other tasks can be treated as nice-to-haves and go on the low-priority list.

Splitting your tasks this way will ensure you and your team remain laser focused on your goal and avoid getting distracted by less important tasks.

Within these 2 task groups, you may want to prioritize further by using high, medium, and low-priority statuses in your task management software of choice.

5. Document project risks

Anything that can affect your project (positively or negatively) and is outside of your project’s scope is called a project risk. 

Potential risks may pop up at any time throughout the project. Some risks may be completely unexpected and unavoidable, while others might never occur. But, keeping a tidy risk register from the earliest stages of the project will save you from being blindsided by issues you could have seen coming.

The risk register should be updated throughout the project, and it should contain: 

• The name of the risk, 
• Its probability and impact scores, 
• Owner, 
• Mitigation measures, and 
• Mitigation budget, at the very least.

With this information at the ready, project managers can stay prepared if something goes wrong and react promptly, or in some cases completely sidestep the issue.

6. Delegate work evenly

While it’s natural to want to give the most important work to the most skilled workers to ensure the quality of the final product — this strategy tends to backfire.

Overburdening a minority of employees with the bulk of the work will only result in delays in the project schedule and the employees’ eventual burnout. Instead, take care to evenly distribute the workload. 

Sometimes, uneven work distribution might happen unintentionally and without you realizing it. In these situations, using the Kanban view can help you detect the issue more quickly than the standard Timeline view.

Thanks to its visual nature, the Kanban view makes it easy to detect where the bottlenecks are happening and zero in on the cause.

7. Communicate with your team and stakeholders

If you want to stay on track with your project deadlines, encourage transparent communication within and among project teams, especially those that frequently collaborate.

This can include: 

• Leaving feedback in the comments section of a task, 
• @mentioning people in conversations that relate to their work, 
• Sharing files, or 
• Simply notifying relevant parties about the current status of a task. 

Frequent and open communication can help detect potential issues and solve problems — use it to your advantage.

Similarly, communication with project stakeholders is equally important.

The most common way to reach project stakeholders is through periodic project status reports. 

Status reports show stakeholders how far along the project is and how it’s progressing, but they also list active project risks, or ones that are likely to crop up in the near future. Status reports are a good way to highlight these issues and ask for help when necessary.

8. Monitor progress

To ensure all your preparation doesn’t go to waste, continue monitoring your progress and updating documentation throughout the project.

The most effective way to monitor progress is to use project management software where all your project information is updated in real time and you have access to all notifications and activity logs.

Monitoring progress means staying on top of the project at all times and being able to promptly respond to upcoming issues, or prevent them altogether. 

This ensures that you minimize the delays that come with unexpected issues and meet even tight deadlines in a timely manner.

Crush your deadlines with Plaky

Meeting deadlines is never as easy as it seems — Murphy’s law, which states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, seeks to thwart your efforts at every corner.

But, with careful preparation and reliable project management software at our beck and call, we can minimize the damage and maximize our chances of success.

If this sounds like exactly what you need, try Plaky. Plaky is our project management software with a comprehensive Free Forever plan that can help you organize and seamlessly manage your projects.

With features like conditional coloring, custom fields, advanced filtering options, and unlimited users, items, and boards, you’ll be able to customize your workspace to fit your exact needs and manage your projects with ease.

If we’ve got you curious, don’t hesitate to try Plaky for free and give it a go.

And if you’re interested in boosting your productivity as a whole, we’ve got you covered on that end as well. The CAKE.com Productivity Bundle offers 3 amazing products for the price of 1, and includes Enterprise plans for: 

• Clockify — world’s most popular free time tracking tool,
• Pumble — best business messaging tool with free messaging history, and
• Plaky — a modern and intuitive project management tool.