Certainly in the short term, doing everything possible to make the client see progress will have many advantages for keeping their confidence in your ability; it is often tempting to take shortcuts to achieve this. In the longer term, this approach usually leads to many problems—especially when the project has a higher level of complexity. Examples of these problems include:
Research that hasn't been thoroughly verified - Regardless of whether you are a journalist, business consultant or a software developer designing a data flow model to match the client's specifications, research that hasn't been verified for its accuracy will lead to the end outcome of the project being flawed.
Work that hasn't been structured to provide flexibility - It doesn't matter whether you're a programmer writing software, a designer setting the layout for a brochure or someone creating a report document, it's almost always a guarantee that there will be a need to make some type of change(s...