The Project That Failed Under My Leadership and What I Did Next

The contract was the largest I had led at the digital agency in Glasgow - a twelve-month web platform redevelopment for a public sector client with a team of seven and a budget that was, by the agency's standards, significant.

I had managed well to that point across smaller engagements and my promotion to this project had felt like the natural next step. What I had not fully accounted for was the degree to which scale changes everything.

The communication overhead of seven people is not proportionally larger than the communication overhead of two or three - it is categorically different. The stakeholder management on a public sector contract is not a larger version of the stakeholder management on a private client engagement - it is a different discipline with different constraints.

I learned both of these things inside the project rather than before it, which is the most expensive way to learn them. At month seven, during a quarterly review with the client, it became clear that we were substantially behind on a deliverable that I had been managing as amber in my reporting and that the client had been expecting as green.

The gap between my internal assessment and their external expectation was the result of communication failures that were mine to own - I had been insufficiently direct about risks, had optimised for the relationship at the cost of the accuracy of the information I was sharing, and had deferred difficult conversations in ways that made them more difficult when they arrived.

The project recovered - not fully and not without significant cost to the relationship, the agency's reputation with that client, and my own confidence. The response I had immediately after the quarterly review, which I have thought about since as the decision that mattered most in that period, was to be completely transparent with my own management about what had gone wrong and why, without the softening or self-protection that the situation invited.

The transparency produced consequences that were uncomfortable and that were significantly less damaging than the alternative of managed disclosure. At 31, I lead larger projects and communicate more directly about risk than feels comfortable in any given moment. The discomfort of that directness is the lesson applied.