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My company recently put a new set of CRM features into production and management is eager to find ways to monetize them. A large part of my job has become analyzing the new data and making recommendations on how to leverage it. I'm generally expected to produce results within a short amount of time, which would be fine, but more often than not, I discover major issues that make the data unusable. As the system is quite complex and has a lot of moving parts, it can take many hours across multiple teams to find the root cause of an issue and even more time after it's been resolved to collect enough new data to be used in a report.

The people I'm presenting to are non-technical and aren't interested in hearing excuses about why a report wasn't finished by the deadline. As I am the one responsible for delivering the results, I am also the one who bares most of the responsibility for the failure to deliver. It also doesn't help that I'm fairly new to the company and everyone else on the project is a senior leader with many years' worth of successful deliveries under their belts.

Going forward, what can I do to manage expectations and reduce the amount of blame for a missed deadline that lands on me?

I don't have a lot of knowledge in your field, but if I could, I would transition to working where I can at least provide some information when due.

I'm not sure, but it sounds like your model is a house of cards, where the slightest misunderstanding from the offset can cause it to crumble down? Can you restructure how you use data so that you don't have high levels of dependencies on certain parts of it. Are you able to do early checks on the validity of the data before you go down the rabbit hole too much?

If I was your manager I'd ask when the common strategies are for overcoming these obstacles. For instance, in my domain (programming), if a manager asked how we can avoid setbacks regarding bugs, I'm discuss peer-review, continuous integration and the like. Given you seem to be the most senior person with this knowledge, it's your role to come up with solutions.

Rather than reduce blame, you should consider reducing the impact of a missed report.

In answering your question, you cannot simply arrive at a meeting without the work that you have meant to have finished. You need to keep your manager abreast of any issues you are having, and be proactive in finding solutions. If you are scheduled to present information in a meeting, and you don't have that information ready, you need to let your manager know before the meeting, and have a revised timeframe ready.

It's also quite possible that the fact they are non-technical doesn't matter. They want results, and don't care about excuses, even if they many or may not understand them.