There is No Good Deal with Those Who are Not Good: The Lack of Good Faith in Projects

In this podcast, Ricardo talks about a complex situation where a stakeholder, on the client-side, refuses to accept deliveries, seeking to impute contractual penalties to the company managing the project. Ricardo shows two actions, one preventive and one corrective, that can be taken.

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Episode transcript

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Hello everybody welcome to the five minutes PM podcasts today. I like to comment on a request that I receive from Australia, talking about problems with stakeholders. So let's suppose that you have once they quarter that the client that is paying for this stake holders, and in the order side, you have a management company that is managing the projects and the stakeholder's on the client side are trying to delay as much as they can't the decisions.

They are trying to create trouble for the managing company that is managing the project just to claim at the end to claim for free services, to claim for cost reduction, to put penalties on the contracting company. So the best way to answer this it's to take this into two sites, the first is the actions that you can do to prevent this. And the second one is to fix this. So let's talk about preventers.

So the first thing I want to do you share with you my personal experience. And also I want to use a quote that is attributed to Warren Buffett. There is no Good Deal with Those Who are Not Good. So if you were handling and are about to do business with someone you don't trust, don't go further because I'm sure there is no contract on this planet that will protect you from the lack of good faith.

So it's very important to understand this, and this is critical cool knowledge. You need to develop knowledge and perception that you need to develop. So you need to understand what is behind the real, interest in every single project. So you can understand that this is the right or the wrong thing for you as a project manager. But now, of course, I need to talk about the correction because you may say, well, Ricardo the awards you said are amazing, but now I am in trouble.

So I'm already doing business with someone that is not good. So what I can do. So I won't just tell you one thing, the first thing you need to understand is that you are in crisis. I wrote several articles because you can now go out on my website about crisis management. You need to understand that when you are in crisis, there is no good solution. There is the bat and the worst. So you need to understand that you have a problem.

Now, this is the first step. The second step is how to handle the first thing, you need to understand that. Now you need to increase the formalization of the project. You need to start changing your style from the traditional phone calls, you know, ad hoc meetings to more formalize the approach because you are handling pretty much with the enemy. So you need to reduce. And this of course will add a note layer off work for the project office, for example, because you need to formalize everything.

And this is the good thing about proper scope management. Because if you know exactly what is your scope, you can benefit from all these documents to avoid this kind of dangerous behaviour. You need to understand that you need to increase the control over your process, not only your time project management process but also your communication, you know, process. So you need to have control of who attends the meetings, how I will produce the meeting minutes, how we handle contracts, and do you know, it's very sad what I'm telling to you in the project perspective.

But most of the time you be replacing people like your engineer, the discus, the way that the wall would be. We built for lawyers because most of the time, when you have this lack of good Faith, you shift the discussions from the scope of the project to, Oh, you know, item 31 on the contract, punishments your role and how they can prosecute you, or they can create any trouble. Are you, so you need to understand that his, a change in the mindset, maybe you need even two change people from both sides.

So for example, John was responsible for talking to the client. Maybe you need to change John or Mike for someone else to give a new, fresh perspective. It's very, very important because you are in a crisis, you need to understand that the traditional way of managing your project is no longer. The valid is that you need to create a more, more formalized process to protect you on this kind of challenge enough course at the end you need, even with all this pain to learn, to not repeat this again in the future, again, it's very, very important.

The Projects are always between Good people. It's very hard for you to do a great project with your hands. It's very, very tough So it's the wrong business for both sides because the client doing that is correct completely unaware of the consequences. The most important thing is that Projects, there is no penalty in any contract that will be, we covered the benefits of a Good project. Think about that and see you next week with another five minutes BM Podcast.

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There is No Good Deal with Those Who are Not Good: The Lack of Good Faith in Projects

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