After graduation, you obtain a project manager position in the planning department of a technology center. You are responsible for creating and overseeing project time and cost budget estimates. Your five-person department's overall performance is based on whether projects are completed within estimated time and cost budget projections. You are asked to scope multiple building projects, including a building expansion. You develop the best time and cost construction estimates you can for the building expansion, and you are very confident that it can be completed in 12 months at $2 million, a budget that includes some flexibility for the usual unforeseeable problems that arise. However, it is common practice on your team to heavily inflate project time and cost estimates to ensure that performance goals are always met. Using the heavily inflated standard, you should report that the project will be completed in 16 months for $2.5 million. You are uncomfortable with the heavily inflated practice. At times, it seems as though you're lying because many, but not all, projects are actually completed within your initial, minimally inflated, time and cost estimates. In addition, funds committed to your building expansion project at the higher level means they are unavailable for other projects that would benefit the organization. Lastly, the heavily inflated budgets may reduce stress, but they occasionally lead to less than optimal project performance because team members don't perform at peak efficiency when they know time and money are available to fix mistakes that may not have occurred if the time and cost budgets had been less generous. What would you do? 1. Produce and report accurate minimally inflated estimates of 12 months and $2 million 2. Produce and report heavily inflated estimates of 16 months and $2.5 million 3. Something else (if so, what?)