Episode 7: Bringing the Outside In

Wouldn’t it be great if we could have complete control over all that affects our project success? But guess what – we live in the real world. In the pursuit of engaging excellence, we’ve talked about the Rational Four – scope, cost, quality and schedule; we’ve talked about the Relational Three – the in-house, contractor and stakeholder families.  Now we have the Readiness Two – as in, are you ready for action? On one side, we have our suppliers. We rely on them to provide those inputs that we bake into our transformation of idea to reality. We need that stuff- from tangible materials to intangible information. But it may seem that we have no control over the whims of our suppliers.  Likewise, we need to make certain predictions of the future and, while, as the saying goes, we hope for the best and prepare for the worst – how do we really lead this whole area that we call risk, those threats that have a probability from likely to rare. We want to lead confidently, but not naively and we want to be protected but not smothered in needless insurances. Let’s see how a joyful project might think about these topics.