[actionscripted]

OT but I'd be more curious to know how you handle things when you've done it "right". Said yes to this, no to that. You're booked with an abundance of time.

Then you hit a snag in a project and what you thought was going to take a few days ends up taking weeks. Then more weeks because of more unforseen issues.

Sure you could've researched things to death from the start but there were hidden gremlins you couldn't have seen until you were knee-deep in either research or development.

What then? You're going to blow your deadline and that'll cascade to other work scheduled after your current workload.

[Fordrus]

Report, report, report. Who are you delivering the final product to? Email that person, tell that person during stand-up, "I discovered issue X in my project today, this pushes back my deadline by Y hours/days/weeks/months/millennia." You don't HAVE to manage the entire fallout, necessarily, right away, but if you start raising alarm bells early, you can harness your team to assist in adapting! :)

The other thing? CUT. Can't have feature completed by next week? What are the parameters? Could you do a mock-up or a skeleton of it and have it serve the immediate, urgent purpose, while potentially still moving you towards final feature nirvana? Better phrased: you've hit a snag, you can't deliver what you said, on the deadline that you said- especially if you fear that manager you'll be reporting to, tell him/her what you CAN still deliver on that timetable. "What CAN you deliver, then?" is almost certainly on someone in your chain of command's mind, desperately begging for an answer! :)