Promise and Deliver

Promise and Deliver

In fact, you should always under-promise and over-deliver, as you and your enterprise will be ultimately evaluated on the quality of your work. Under-promise and over-deliver means keeping every promise you make, carefully understanding what is expected of you, and delivering more than is expected in order to exceed people’s expectations.

Making promises you cannot keep will mean that others will lose faith in you and ultimately stop communicating with you. Actually, people have antennae for manipulation and will notice any half-truth or lies you fell. Sincerity, on the other hand, is much more powerful and people will detect if you genuinely believe what you tell them.

There are no shortcuts in this process, and this involves professionalism and hard work to ensure you do every job to the best of your ability.

To develop and maintain relationship, under-promising and over-delivering will help you come across as trustworthy and sincere, and will provide true benefits, such is long-term relationship, enhanced trust, repeat business and more.

The ability to quickly assess the amount of work to be delivered is a great skill. Many people tend to over-promise to their boss because they make a mistake when assessing the amount of work to be completed. They lack to agree on one of two points (or on both of them) – the deliverables and the timeline.

To develop and maintain relationship, under-promising and over-delivering will help you come across as trustworthy and sincere, and will provide true benefits, such is long-term relationship, enhanced trust, repeat business and more. Illustration : Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

First at all, make sure that you agree on the deliverables. It may be clearly stated, for example – “I want a  twenty-slides PowerPoint presentation on the sales of the past month”. The deliverables are clear and you can start to assess the work to be done.

In other instances the deliverables may be vague or too general, for example – “I want an assessment of opportunities to expand our business into another country”. In this case, additional questions arise in order to understand what is expected: “Do you mean Africa or Asia?”. “What do you mean by expanding into a market?”, “Do you want a Word or a PowerPoint?” Once you agree on the deliverables, you will then need to assess the work to be done.

Assessing a workload

There exists a simple method of assessing the amount of work required. The key is to break down the deliverables into small and quantifiable actions so that you can build your project plan.

Start up by taking a look at the deliverables and decide how to best break them into “sub-deliverables”. Be careful and make sure you use MECE when breaking down your points.