How to Spot a Struggling Program Before the Client Does

One of my favorite things a client has ever said to me is “I never even knew there was a problem.” That sounds like a small thing but it’s actually one of the most meaningful compliments a client services leader can receive, because it means the team caught something, handled it quietly, and the client only ever saw the solution. That’s the job done right.

Getting there consistently requires developing an eye for the early signals, the ones that show up weeks or months before a deadline slips or a client starts asking hard questions. None of them are dramatic on their own. Most of them look like normal business at first glance. But if you know what you’re looking for, they tell you exactly where the team needs support before things get complicated.

Here are three I watch for, what they really mean, and what to do when you see them.

Sign 1: Nobody has started working on the big deliverables due later in the year.

This one is easy to miss because on the surface the team looks productive. Short-term deadlines are getting met, status updates are clean, and nobody is panicking. The problem is that the deliverables due six months from now aren’t getting any attention, because the ones due next week feel more urgent.

That’s human nature, and it’s completely understandable, but it’s also how programs end up in crisis. By the time a big deliverable feels urgent, you’ve usually already lost the runway you needed to do it well. The research that should have started in month two gets crammed into month five. The draft that needed three rounds of review gets one. The client gets something that doesn’t reflect the team’s actual capabilities, and trust erodes in a way that’s hard to trace back to a single moment.

The fix is building production schedules for every deliverable due throughout the period of performance, not just the ones coming up in the next few weeks. Map out what needs to happen and when, then work backwards to figure out when work actually needs to start. In most cases, that date is earlier than anyone expects. Assign the early groundwork now, even if the due date feels far away, and revisit the schedule regularly so the team always knows where they stand.

This is also worth a direct conversation with the team. Sometimes people are holding back on longer-term work because they’re waiting for direction, clarification on scope, or a dependency from someone else. Surfacing that early gives you time to clear the path before it becomes a bottleneck.

Sign 2: Work is about to go to the client with no one reviewing it first.

This one usually surfaces in a passing comment rather than a formal flag. Someone mentions that they’re sending the deliverable directly to the client because there isn’t time for a review, or because they assume someone else already looked at it, or because the review process was never clearly defined to begin with. Any of those is a problem worth taking seriously.

When deliverables go out without a quality control step, you’re essentially letting the client serve as your final reviewer. Sometimes that goes fine. But when it doesn’t, the damage is disproportionate to the error, because the client’s trust in your team’s judgment takes a hit that’s hard to recover from quickly. And often the person who submitted it had no idea there was an issue, which means the feedback stings in a way that affects morale on top of everything else.

If your team doesn’t have a clear quality control workflow, this is the moment to build one. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. A simple RACI chart that defines who produces, who reviews, and who approves before anything goes out is enough to get started. The goal is that everyone understands their role in the production process and nobody is surprised to learn a deliverable went out without the review they thought was happening.

It’s also worth going back to look at how the team got into a jam in the first place. If reviewers are consistently skipped because there isn’t time, the production schedule might be the real issue, not the people. Fix the schedule and the quality control problem usually resolves itself.

Sign 3: Timesheets show a lot of overtime early in the period of performance.

Overtime early in a contract is one of those signals that can be easy to explain away. The team is motivated, they’re getting up to speed, there’s always more work to do in the beginning. All of that might be true. But overtime early in the PoP is also one of the clearest early indicators that the budget is going to be a problem later, and if you don’t address it now, you’ll be having a much harder conversation in month eight.

The first thing to do is talk to the team about what’s actually driving the extra hours. Sometimes it’s scope that wasn’t fully understood at kickoff. Sometimes it’s an inefficiency in how work is being distributed. Sometimes it’s a staffing gap that needs to be filled. And sometimes it’s just a culture where people feel pressure to always be working, which is worth addressing on its own.

Once you understand the cause, revisit the timeline and resource plan with that information in mind. If the current pace is unsustainable, the plan needs to change now while there’s still time to make adjustments without impacting deliverables. And start modeling what the budget looks like at the current burn rate so you’re not caught off guard. Budget surprises are stressful for your team and uncomfortable to explain to clients. Getting ahead of them early, even if the news isn’t great, is almost always the better path.

The clients who trust you most are usually the ones who learned early on that you’d tell them the truth before it became an emergency. That reputation is worth protecting.

None of these signs mean the program is failing. They mean the program needs attention, and you’re in a position to give it that attention before the client ever notices something was off. That’s the whole point. It’s not about being the person who swoops in after everything falls apart. It’s about being the person who made sure it never got that far.

It’s all about helping the team succeed so the client succeeds.