If, like me, you receive BBC news notifications on your phone, you’ll know that it rarely means good news. 

As a delivery person, you are often the notification to stakeholders. 

Nothing will annoy your stakeholders more than finding out that there are six weeks of development and testing left to complete…… a week before going live.

The first questions that you will be asked are, how long have you known this and why didn’t you tell us before?

You now have the over run to deal with AND a trust problem to fix that you could have done without.

If you can see dates slipping, don’t keep the problems hidden and try to solve them in the background. For one thing that’s a really lonely place to be working from, even if you solve the issue you will have been under a lot of stress that probably wasn’t needed.

Instead, highlight the risk in your status report, sprint review or however else you communicate with your stakeholders. Provide a plan to resolve and the impact of slippage if unresolved. Make sure that they know what’s happening, that you’re on top of things and most importantly, give them a chance to help.

There may have to be a difficult conversation but it’s better to have it as early as you can.