A Habit I Picked up the Hard Way
Early in my career, I ran a project that had every ingredient for success. Good budget, a clear deadline, a team that showed up on time. It still stalled for three months because one person, who never sat in a single meeting, had to approve the final step. Nobody had asked her a thing until it was too late.
Since then, I ask one question before anything else on a new project: who has to say yes for this to actually happen?
It sounds obvious. It is not. Most kickoff meetings spend their time on scope, timeline, and budget. Those matter, but they assume the approval chain is already settled. It rarely is.
Why This Gets Skipped
Teams like to start with the work because the work feels like progress. Mapping out who holds veto power feels like paperwork. So it gets pushed to the side, and it surfaces later as a delay nobody planned for.
In government and in large organizations, approval rarely sits with one person. It moves through a legal reviewer, a budget office, a security team, sometimes a union representative. Each of them can stop a project cold, and none of them owe you a fast answer just because your timeline says so.
If I do not name every one of those people in week one, I find out about them in week eight, right when I need an answer in two days instead of two weeks.
What I Actually Do With the Answer
Once I have the list, I do three things.
I meet each approver before I need anything from them. Not a pitch, just a short conversation about what the project is and what I will eventually ask of them. People say yes faster to something they already understand.
I ask each one what would make them say no. This is the part people skip because it feels like inviting trouble. It is the opposite. If a legal reviewer tells me upfront that a certain data-sharing clause will stop the project, I can fix that clause in month one instead of finding out in month five.
I write the approval chain into the plan itself, with names attached. Not “legal review” as a line item, but the actual person, with a realistic estimate of how long their part takes based on what they told me. A generic line item hides risk. A name attached to a date does not.
The Part That Surprises People
The approvers I talk to early almost always move faster than the ones I talk to late. That is not because I am persuasive. It is because early contact turns them into someone with context, and late contact turns them into someone with a surprise on their desk. People move slower on surprises. That is just how it works, in a federal agency or anywhere else.
I have watched projects with weaker plans beat projects with stronger plans, purely because the weaker plan had its approvals lined up and the stronger one did not. Planning quality gets a lot of attention. Approval sequencing gets almost none, and it decides more outcomes than people admit.
A Small Check Before Any Kickoff
Before I sign off on a timeline now, I ask myself one thing: have I named every person who can stop this, and have I already talked to each of them? If the answer is no, the timeline is not real yet, no matter how good it looks on paper.
It is a small habit. It takes maybe two hours in the first week of a project. But it is the difference between a delay you saw coming and one that ambushes you, and in my experience, the ambush is always more expensive.