0. Humans are bad at predicting the future. Make sure you're socializing that fundamental principle, especially to the customer. 1. You also need to model your

0. Humans are bad at predicting the future. Make sure you're socializing that fundamental principle, especially to the customer. 1. You also need to model your project in more than one way as a self-validation. PMI-certified PMPs especially love a single, structured approach. 2. Provide estimates in ranges and fight for that to be the organizational norm. Once you win this battle, insure your first few reps are on time/on budget. 3. Don't let anyone pad their estimates. Do the padding at the end. Engineers especially love to pad their estimates since they hate giving answers based on unknown information, so show them that you're padding at the END and that their job is to provide the most accurate estimate. 4. Postmortem ALL THE TIME. At the macro and the micro. Your sales engineers should be sufficiently experienced to balance the hard with the soft skills AND have previous projects to draw on experience-wise.