My team just took tons of heat because there was a complex performance issue that needed our full attention. We clearly communicated that we would need a large chunk of time to solve it, and while we tried to stay responsive, a lot of stuff had to just get ignored for a while to be able to make any progress on it.
We're finished now, and what we did will eventually save the client literally months of time over the long run, but because we weren't constantly placating the people who wanted to see the job "getting done," we put ourselves at risk of losing the contract.
All's well that ends well, I guess. We finished the task, and now we're back to churning through the high visibility low-effort issues and everyone's happy again, but all of those small issues combined don't have as much impact as the big task we just finished.
One strategy is to consider establishing a success metric as the first step to every project. If you can't design a measurement for success/failure, maybe you shouldn't be doing that project.
This is the one point that I keep re-iterating to the teams I work with. If you can't define what a success is move on and do something else where you can. It's very easy to get caught up in interesting stuff 'just because' but if it does not contribute in a measurable way then it's just another distraction that you should avoid.
Managing a client relationship is very different than managing employees. For managing clients I like over-communicating status while hiding my internal processes as much as possible to allow for a little bit of bullshiting when needed.
My team just took tons of heat because there was a complex performance issue that needed our full attention. We clearly communicated that we would need a large chunk of time to solve it, and while we tried to stay responsive, a lot of stuff had to just get ignored for a while to be able to make any progress on it.
We're finished now, and what we did will eventually save the client literally months of time over the long run, but because we weren't constantly placating the people who wanted to see the job "getting done," we put ourselves at risk of losing the contract.
All's well that ends well, I guess. We finished the task, and now we're back to churning through the high visibility low-effort issues and everyone's happy again, but all of those small issues combined don't have as much impact as the big task we just finished.