When work is late, the explanation is usually found at the end: someone was overloaded, a file arrived late, a decision took a week. The cause is often at the start. A request came in without a clear owner, a date was promised without checking who had time, and the brief changed without anyone recording it.
The free PLYNT business scan asks three questions in its Execution category: what share of work ships later than the date you promised, how often finished work comes back for rework, and whether every project has exactly one accountable owner. In the scan’s bands, up to 5% of work shipping late is the lowest-risk answer and more than 30% the highest.
Where late work begins
- Requests arrive everywhere. Email, chat, phone and meetings. Without one place to land, some are lost and others start without a decision.
- Nobody owns the decision. If three people can say yes, nobody is responsible for saying no.
- Dates are promised before capacity is checked. The person who will do the work finds out about the deadline after it has been agreed.
- Dependencies are invisible. A task that waits for approval or for another task looks as if it is in progress.
- The brief changes quietly. Work finished against yesterday’s instructions comes back as rework.
One owner per project
An accountable owner is not the person who does all the work. It is the person who knows the state of the project, makes or escalates decisions and speaks for it. Many people can contribute; one person answers the question “will it be ready?”. When that person changes, the handover is explicit.
A routine for keeping dates
- Collect requests in one place, each with the client, what is needed and how urgent it is.
- Give each request an owner who decides whether it is accepted, changed or declined.
- Check the workload before promising a date. Look at the assignee’s open tasks, planned leave and other deadlines.
- Turn the accepted request into tasks with the brief, files and dependencies attached, so nothing has to be asked twice.
- Record changes where the work is. If the brief changes, the task changes, and the date is reviewed with the owner.
- Review late work weekly. For each late item, note the reason in one line. After a month the pattern is usually obvious.
Rework is a signal, not bad luck
When finished work comes back, the cause is usually one of three things: the brief was unclear, it changed after work started, or the person reviewing it was not the person who approved the brief. Each has a simple fix: a written brief, recorded changes and a named approver.
How PLYNT supports this
In PLYNT every request has an owner and a recorded decision, and an accepted request becomes a task with the client, files and agreement attached. Tasks have assignees, deadlines and dependencies, and assignments sit next to attendance and leave, so capacity is visible before a date is promised. See requests and approvals, projects and tasks and people and workload.
To see how your delivery scores, take the free business scan.