"The project that overran" survives in people's memory. The reasons it overran, the value it still delivered, the conditions that caused it, mostly do not.
Why the short version wins
The illusory truth effect, first documented by Hasher, Goldstein, and Toppino in 1977, found that simply repeating a statement measurably increases how true it feels, independent of whether it is actually accurate, and the effect holds whether the repetition is minutes or weeks apart. A simple, memorable headline requires no effort to repeat. The full context, why the delay happened, what was actually delivered, what the original brief even asked for, requires real work to hold onto and repeat accurately. Nobody is lying when the short version wins. Repetition alone does the work of making it feel settled and true, whether or not it captures what actually happened.
Why this matters for how your work gets remembered
If you do not manage the one sentence that ends up representing something you did, someone else's sentence will do it for you, and their version will usually be the simpler, more repeatable one, not the more accurate one.
Where to start
After anything that could get reduced to an unflattering headline, a project that ran long, a launch that slipped, actively supply the short version yourself before someone else's fills the gap.
Not spin, one honest, memorable sentence that includes the part that actually matters, the outcome, the value, the reason. "It ran three weeks over because we caught a data issue that would have cost the client twice that" is exactly as short as "it ran over," and it is the version worth being the one to say first.
Reading how much context a specific headline actually needs to be fair, versus what would just be over-explaining, is a judgment worth making once, deliberately, right after the moment happens. What this gives you is the reason it is worth doing at all, before someone else's shorter version sets in.
There is a specific way to phrase a hard outcome so the honest version is exactly as memorable as the unflattering one, and it is worth having ready before you need it.