The most expensive phrase in agency delivery

"I thought they were handling that."

I've heard some version of that phrase in every agency I've ever worked with. In fact, I'd be willing to bet you've heard it too. It usually shows up at exactly the wrong moment, right when a project starts feeling a little shaky. Maybe a deadline gets missed. Maybe a client is frustrated. Maybe someone discovers that an important task wasn't completed because everyone assumed someone else was taking care of it.

The phrase itself isn't particularly dramatic. It's something we all say from time to time, both at work and at home. My partner and I have certainly had our share of conversations that start with, "Wait, I thought you were handling that." Usually, the stakes are pretty low. One of us forgot to pick something up at the store. Nobody made dinner plans. One of us thought the other took the garbage out as the garbage truck approaches the house at 7am. Oops. We figure it out and move on.

At work, though, the consequences tend to be a little more expensive.

When an assumption finds its way into a client relationship, a project plan, a scope document, or a team dynamic, the impact can linger for weeks or even months. Trust erodes, people become frustrated, clients lose confidence, and folks spend time solving problems that could have been avoided with a single conversation at the beginning of a project.

What makes this particularly interesting is that the phrase can come from anyone. I've heard project managers say it about account managers. I've heard account managers say it about project managers. Designers say it about developers. Founders say it about their leadership teams. Clients say it about agencies. Agencies say it about clients.

The more I think about it, the more I believe this simple phrase reveals one of the most common challenges in agency delivery. Most of the time, the issue isn't that someone dropped the ball. It's that people started from different assumptions about who owned the ball in the first place.

And once that happens, projects have a funny way of teaching everyone the same lesson.

When assumptions become part of the scope

One of the most memorable examples I've experienced wasn't caused by a missed deadline or a blown budget. It started with an expectation that was never discussed.

A client hired my team to deliver a project and, somewhere along the way, came to believe that we would also be managing the project on their side of the organization. They expected us to coordinate internal stakeholders, collect feedback, chase approvals, and generally keep their team aligned and moving forward.

The only problem was that nobody had ever agreed to that. (I never would! OMG!!)

So, it wasn't included in the scope. And it surely wasn't discussed during kickoff. It wasn't something we had budgeted for or planned to do. More importantly, it wasn't something we realistically could do.

We weren't employees of their organization. We didn't even know them! We weren't embedded in their team. We didn't have the authority to tell people what to do or the context needed to navigate their internal politics and priorities. We could absolutely facilitate conversations, make recommendations, and help guide the work, but there was a line between managing the project and managing their company.

Unfortunately, we didn't discover the disconnect until the project was already underway.

From the client's perspective, we weren't providing a service they thought they had purchased. From our perspective, we were being asked to perform work that had never been part of the agreement. Neither side was trying to be difficult. Nobody was acting in bad faith. We were simply operating from two completely different sets of expectations.

That misunderstanding created friction almost immediately. Mostly because the client was devoid of any organizing unit, and they were a leaderless cross-functional team of...leaders. So there was no leader and no PM. As you might imagine, it was a cluster. As soon as we realized what was happening, it was easy to see why conversations became more complicated. Decisions took longer than they should have. My team found themselves spending time explaining responsibilities instead of focusing on the work itself. The relationship became harder than it needed to be.

The project faced other challenges along the way, and I wouldn't blame the outcome entirely on this one issue. But it taught me an important lesson that I've seen repeated countless times since then: assumptions have a way of becoming very expensive.

Most project problems don't begin when something goes wrong. They begin much earlier, when people leave a conversation believing they heard the same thing when they actually heard something very different.

The problem usually starts long before the project does

One thing I've noticed over the years is that these situations rarely come from bad intentions. Most people aren't trying to avoid responsibility. They aren't refusing to communicate. They aren't intentionally creating confusion for their teammates or clients.

They're busy.

Agency life moves fast. New work is coming in. Clients want aggressive timelines. Teams are juggling multiple priorities. Leadership is trying to balance profitability, staffing, growth, and client satisfaction all at the same time. In the middle of all that, people make reasonable assumptions.

The challenge is that assumptions have a way of compounding. A salesperson has one understanding of how a project will run. A project manager inherits the work with a slightly different understanding. The client has their own expectations. By the time kickoff arrives, everyone feels aligned because they've all participated in the same conversations.

What they haven't necessarily done is confirm that they're walking away with the same interpretation of those conversations. That's where things get interesting.

When I look back at projects that struggled, I rarely find a catastrophic mistake at the center of the story. More often, I find a handful of small misunderstandings that quietly grew over time because nobody realized they existed.

The missed expectation wasn't the problem. The problem was that nobody knew it was a missed expectation until much later.

Why project managers can't solve this alone

Whenever I talk about delivery challenges, someone eventually says, "Well, isn't this exactly why we hire project managers?"

The answer is yes. And no.

Project managers absolutely play an important role in setting expectations, facilitating communication, documenting decisions, and helping teams stay aligned. A good PM can spot confusion before it becomes a problem and ask the questions that everyone else forgot to ask.

But even the best project manager in the world can't fix expectations that were never established in the first place.

I've seen agencies spend months searching for the perfect PM, only to hand that person a rushed scope, incomplete sales conversations, unclear client commitments, and a kickoff meeting scheduled for next Tuesday. Then everyone wonders why the project manager seems overwhelmed.

The reality is that project managers inherit the environment they're given. If important context never makes it from the sales process into delivery, the PM is left trying to fill in the blanks. If decisions were made before the project started but never shared with the team, the PM is left discovering them in real time. If the client was promised something that wasn't fully documented, the PM becomes the person trying to navigate the gap between expectations and reality.

That's a difficult position for anyone to be in.

The healthiest agencies I've worked with don't treat project kickoff as a handoff, they treat it as a transition. The people who sold the work share context. The people who will deliver the work ask questions. Assumptions get challenged before they become problems. Expectations are discussed openly rather than left for people to discover later.

It takes a little more time up front, but it saves an incredible amount of frustration once the work begins. And honestly, most project managers would love to spend less time cleaning up misunderstandings and more time helping projects succeed.

Delivery is built on expectations

One of the reasons I spend so much time thinking and writing about delivery is that it reveals what's really happening inside an organization. You can learn a lot about a company by watching how projects start, how decisions get made, how information gets shared, and how teams work with clients. When those things are healthy, projects tend to move smoothly. When they aren't, the symptoms usually show up in delivery long before anyone recognizes the root cause.

That's why I pay so much attention to the beginning of projects. The kickoff meeting, the handoff from sales, the first conversation with a client, and the discussions about roles and responsibilities all matter more than most people realize. Those moments establish expectations that shape everything that follows.

By the time a project is underway, people are often operating based on assumptions they don't even realize they're making. The client assumes one thing. The agency assumes another. The account manager has one interpretation of a conversation, and the project manager team has another. None of this happens because people are careless. It happens because everyone is moving quickly and nobody stopped to compare notes.

If there's one takeaway I'd leave you with, it's this: spend less time worrying about whether everyone knows what to do and more time making sure everyone understands what's expected of them.

The next time you're kicking off a project, reviewing a scope, or planning a new engagement, ask a simple question: What assumptions are we making right now?

You might be surprised by the answers. You might also avoid a difficult client conversation, an uncomfortable internal meeting, or a project that spends months recovering from a misunderstanding that could have been resolved in five minutes.

And if that's not reason enough to ask the question, I don't know what is.

Because nobody wants to be the person saying,"I thought they were handling that."

T L : D R - Most project problems don't start with missed deadlines or blown budgets. They start with assumptions.

When clients, leaders, account managers, and project teams leave conversations with different expectations, confusion is inevitable. The phrase "I thought they were handling that" is usually a sign that important conversations never happened—or didn't go deep enough.

Strong delivery cultures don't eliminate every misunderstanding. They create space for questions, clarify expectations early, and make assumptions visible before they become expensive.

P.S. The first issue of my Project Management for Humans newsletter goes out Thursday!