The Legal Team is the Best Friend in Protecting Your Project and Your Organisation (Stewardship)

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the legal aspects of project management. He explains that the project manager often may perceive that their work is being delayed due to the requirements of other areas, for example.

Ricardo explains that these requirements are made to protect the project and, in the end, your organization. Often in the eagerness to do things quickly and be agile, the project manager generates future turbulence in which he/she is not prepared.

The project exists as part of an organizational enterprise that continues to exist after the end of the project.

There must be instruments that can protect both the supplier and the buyer, for example. If there is a different understanding regarding payment, delivery, guarantees, obligations, protection, and insurance, the solution will only be possible through the contracts made between the parties.

Legal criteria exist to protect your organization, and it is your duty of care as a steward to protect and support the project and the company you work for.

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Episode transcript

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Hello, everyone; welcome to the Five Minutes Podcast. Today. I would like to discuss the legal aspects surrounding the project activities and why I want to talk about them. I don't want to talk about the legal aspects because I'm not a lawyer, I'm a project manager, but I want to explain to you how important are these legal aspects surrounding your procurement, surrounding your liabilities, your risk management approach, and how they can support you.

Many times we face a dilemma because we want to be agile, we want to be nimble, we want to be fast. And many times, when we work in large organizations, there is a process to be followed. And then suddenly this process is low you down, and then you feel, oh my God, I need to rethink how I approach my legal, so we need to remove bureaucracy. Hold on, stop and think. Many times your legal console and your procurement area are working extremely hard to protect your organization in the long run.

They know how critical is your project, but they know that if things go wrong or they go really wrong. And when you have the support of your legal team, you can do many things that will reduce the chances of problems later in the future. Many times we think, okay, you just, you know, shake hands with your supplier needs all good, you give a phone call, and it's all good. This human capability, this human behavior, it's fantastic.

But when things go wrong, people don't care about shaking hands and, they care about what is written, What is formalized between us. So this dilemma is something that you need to care about all the time because you need to understand that legal teams and procurement teams take care of the relationship of suppliers and other stakeholders, they craft contracts, and the contracts are binding documents, many times they create all the pattern, all the behavior that you must follow to abide by the rules. And it's not just suppliers and stakeholders. We're talking about liability protection; we’re talking about insurance; we’re talking about safety. For example, if you are building something about the safety of the people that will use that building, or for example, losses, imagine that you and your IT team are doing the massive digital transformation, but then for some reason, your team developed the code wrongly and did not connect properly with the supplier.

And then you face massive losses. When you start operating, who will pay for that? It's not; you're shaking hands. You know, it's not, you just go in there and saying, oh, I'm sorry for that. Many times, these agreements create a massive impact on different companies, and your legal area will help you to navigate that. And I'm not talking about creating a contract that just benefits You and does not just create trouble for the other side. No, a good contract is a mutual representation of respect and limits between both parties. And we need to do that. And above and beyond that many projects, they are developing new products, new services, new technologies that will regulate confidentiality, NDA non-disclosure agreements, copyright, patents, because sometimes you have just someone in your team or maybe a supplier that get access to something that in the future may become available in your competitor.

So how do you manage that? So all of these it's only possible because there are people in our teams that are thinking about that. What is the law, what can I do to protect the best interests of my organization? And this is principle number one of those reading the PMBOK seventh edition, stewardship. This is exactly the duty of care. We do not expect you as a project manager to be a lawyer, but we expect that you know how to create the right interface with these professionals to benefit and to improve the results of your projects.

Think about that, and see you next week in another five Minutes Podcast.

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Ricardo Vargas

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The Legal Team is the Best Friend in Protecting Your Project and Your Organisation (Stewardship)

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