Your users will clamor for immediate help and encourage feature creep. Managers will attempt to maintain focus, often without a technical awareness of what is feasible or practical. Once you throw in technology processes new to the organization, and have purse strings controlled by a finance group at remote headquarters, the opportunities for failure begin to blossom. The core problem is a lack of defined responsibility, de facto finger pointing, and an implicit project plan with your own head in the middle of the critical path.
Every project has milestones along the critical path.
Milestones are, simply put, the points at which something should have been accomplished, with dire consequences if it hasn't. The responsibility for meeting milestones may be someone else's, but the failure to meet them reflects badly on you and your team. As project manager, you are accountable for failures in a project even if you didn't cause them. Duncan was an international sales manager. He was a good salesman and manager, but na ve about making promises to his customers.