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Hello everyone, here is Ricardo Vargas, and this is the 5 Minutes Podcast.
Think about the last project you delivered.
Now count how many of the people who actually did the work were employees of your organization.
In most projects I have seen over the last few years, the honest answer is: a minority.
At UNOPS, I was responsible for more than a thousand projects across over 120 countries.
Roads in South Sudan, maternity clinics in Haiti, housing in the West Bank.
And almost none of the people mixing the concrete worked for us.
They worked for local contractors, for partner agencies, for firms we had selected through a procurement process and would probably never meet in person.
For a long time I treated that as a peculiarity of humanitarian work.
It is not.
It is now the normal condition of almost every project on the planet.
Your software runs on someone else's cloud.
Your integration is done by a systems integrator.
Your design comes from an agency, your data from a broker, your specialists from a staffing partner.
And increasingly, part of your delivery comes from an AI vendor whose roadmap you do not control and whose model can change next Tuesday.
So the skill that used to be nice to have has quietly become the core skill of the job.
Leading people who do not report to you, and who are not even paid by you.
Let me share three things I have learned the hard way.
The first one is that a contract is not a relationship.
A contract describes what happens when trust breaks down.
It does not create trust, and it does not create commitment.
I have watched teams celebrate the signature of a contract as if the hard part were over.
The hard part had not even started.
The second is that a service level agreement is not a commitment either.
It is a penalty clause.
Your supplier can meet every single indicator in that agreement, and your project can still fail completely.
Ninety-nine point nine percent availability sounds excellent until you discover that the outage happened during your go-live weekend.
Compliance with the contract and success of the project are two different things, and confusing them is one of the most expensive mistakes I see.
The third is about your risk register.
In most organizations, supplier risk sits somewhere near the bottom, described in one generic line.
Look at the projects that actually went wrong in your company in the last three years.
How many of them failed because of something your own team did?
And how many failed because of a delivery that never arrived, a partner who was acquired, a vendor who changed priorities, a specialist who was moved to a bigger client?
Supplier risk is not an annex to your risk analysis.
Very often it is the top of it.
So what do you do about it?
Bring your partners into planning, not only into execution.
People defend plans they helped to build.
When you hand a finished schedule to a supplier and ask them to confirm it, you get compliance.
When you build the schedule with them, you get ownership.
Those are completely different behaviors under pressure.
Give them the purpose, not just the scope.
In humanitarian work, I saw this every week.
A contractor who knows that a clinic has to open before the rainy season behaves differently from a contractor delivering item forty-seven of a specification.
The work is identical; the commitment is not.
Most suppliers have never been told what the project is actually for.
Tell them.
And escalate early, and personally.
The worst thing you can do when a partner starts slipping is to write a formal letter.
The letter protects you legally and destroys your operationally, because from that moment the conversation moves to the lawyers and the delivery stops improving.
Pick up the phone first.
Talk to the person who can actually change the priority, not the account manager whose job is to keep you calm.
Here is what I would ask you to do this week.
Name the three external organizations your project cannot survive without.
Write them down.
Then ask yourself when the last time was you spoke with a leader inside those organizations, someone with real authority over resources, and not only with the person assigned to manage your account.
If you cannot remember, you do not have a partnership.
You have an invoice.
The question is not whether you can control the people who do not work for you.
You cannot.
The question is whether you have given them a reason to care about your project as much as you do.
I hope you enjoyed this episode, and see you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.
