I once took over a project that had already been sold. It was the first engagement with a new strategic client, and to be competitive the offer carried a large discount. The budget I was handed was undersized for the scope. The scope itself had not changed.
The gap nobody had named
Nobody lied. The offer was written to win, and the estimate behind it had been adjusted until the number worked. What was missing was a moment, before signature, when someone who would own the delivery said: this does not close. By the time the project reached me, the gap was already a fact, and all the pressure moved onto the delivery team and onto me.
Why this happens so easily
A bid has a deadline and a competitor. A delivery plan has neither, so it tends to arrive second. The people writing the offer are rewarded for winning, the people delivering are rewarded for landing the project, and they rarely sit in the same meeting. Each side acts reasonably from where it stands, and the system still produces a price that nobody who will deliver it believes.
What I did
I made the gap visible inside the company instead of absorbing it quietly. I prioritised hard to protect the core scope, and I accepted a period of extra effort, including overtime, as a conscious exception with a clear end date. Not as the plan: as an exception that everyone understood and that had an owner.
Overtime cannot be the plan.
What I ask for before an offer leaves the building
I have written RFP responses myself, so I understand the pull to win first and solve later. These are the checks I try to make part of the process:
- Delivery is in the room. Someone who will own the work, a tech lead or a delivery manager, reviews the estimate, not only the sales team.
- Assumptions are in the offer. Client inputs, sign-off times, and the availability of integrations and environments are written next to the price, not only in an estimate file.
- A discount is a scope or risk decision. If the price drops, either the scope drops or the risk is priced in. If neither happens, the plan is already broken.
- A broken plan is flagged before signature. A discount that breaks the delivery plan is raised while there are still options, not after.
What it does to a team
When a team is handed a plan it did not believe in, the first sign is not a missed milestone. It is silence. People stop raising small problems because they assume the answer will be to work harder. By the time the first date slips, the project has already lost the early warnings it needed most. An estimate the team helped to build is also one the team defends, and that changes how problems get reported.
None of this slows a sale down much. It moves an uncomfortable conversation from month three, when it is expensive, to week one, when it is cheap.