Pressure is part of any project. Just enough pressure can help energise and drive the team productively towards a goal. Some people call this useful stress, or ‘eustress’.

Excessive pressure leads to distress which can manifest itself in many ways such as procrastination, frustration, mistakes, bad decisions and in extreme cases burn-out.

Regulating the pressure is a vital part of managing any project. Internal pressures can be controlled relatively easily through negotiation and teamwork.

However, managing external pressure from customers is a lot harder because successful businesses will often prioritise their customers’ needs above their own.

Inevitably at some point, customers’ needs or demands overwhelm the team and can create distress. It is in these precise moments that there is great peril.

High pressure can cause simple oversights or errors that happen in seconds but take weeks, or even months, to correct. Some examples of these simple slip-ups are:

• Estimating or quoting a price which is too low, and you are then held to
• Promising a delivery date or quantity which turns out to be unachievable
• Rushing through an engineering change without finishing the due diligence

It is vital to recognise these moments so you can work to regulate the external pressures and try to reduce the risk of errors or mistakes which could wreak havoc in your project.

Here are a few things you can do to try and control the pressure:

Use management as a buffer

This is a good technique especially with particularly demanding customers. Management can deflect some of the pressure away from you and also help buy you more time by inserting themselves into the decision-making process.

Ask for a call or face-to-face meeting

For better or worse, a lot of work is done by email and it can be hard to gauge how urgent an issue really is. To quickly figure this out, ask the customer for a call to discuss the issue. If it really is urgent then the call will be setup quickly. Also, talking the issue through is always a lot more efficient than emailing!

Focus on one thing at a time

This may require some negotiation with the customer to agree the priority but is always worth the effort. By triaging the issues with the customer you can agree a plan to deal with them in the most effective order.

The next time you feel under too much pressure, find the regulator to turn it down. This will always lead to better outcomes for everyone involved.