Trust Is Crucial in Project Coordination
November 11th, 2003 by Hal
This article was written by Michael Sheerin, P.E., Healthcare Division Director TLC Engineering for Architecture, Orlando, Trust Is Crucial in Project Coordination.
Sheerin opens his article this way:
The key ingredient of any successful project is trust: the owner must trust the building team to envision and create the owner's goals; designers must trust the contractor's ability to work within the framework of construction documents to build a living environment; the contractor must trust that the design team has developed a plan comprehensive enough to get them all out of the jungle without too many snake bites.
Great start, unfortunately, there is no more. He has the right idea, but doesn't offer insight into how to do it.
Certainly, the best method for keeping on track throughout the course of a project is communication � the unambiguous, respectful, formal kind as well as the inquiring, personable, informal kind.
He goes on to speak about compromise in the coordination of design documents:
…every coordinating agent should seek to balance the competing interests of all of the design and construction team members to achieve ownership � and acceptance � of sometimes difficult decisions.
He shows his cynical side here:
(A) contractor may take some satisfaction in button-holing a designer for some area of flawed thinking. In the face of concrete dimensional data, designers must drop their egos at the door.
Aargh! I can't go on.
Right title…no understanding of trust. Trust is nurtured and preserved on teams. It starts as compound assessments of each other's competence, reliability, care for the other, and sincerity. Once we spend enough time with each other, trust can be elevated to a central component of a relationship. The problem on projects in the AEC world is we start out as strangers and too often end the project that way. [Strangers, Friends, and Partners]
Yes, trust is crucial in project coordination, just as it is important in all project endeavors. Leaders have the greatest opportunity for intervening where trust is insufficient for the task at hand. The rest of us have the responsibility to see that our leaders do just that.
Related Posts
- The Trusted (Project) Leader Are you a project manager? or project leader? or both? I don't mean to play word games. I usually hear the senior pe...
- Produce Alignment and Trust in the Stories You Tell One last comment (for now) on story-telling...There is a 'richness' that comes from the diversity of project participant...
- Conduct Daily Stand-Up Meetings for Projects The daily stand-up meeting is a crucial aspect of keeping projects moving without interruption. I made two postings: ...
- Revisiting Two Great Wastes™ Silence Fails, a research endeavor by David Maxwell, Vital Smarts, finds that projects suffer when team members fail t...
- Project Meeting Protocols: Managing Commitments in a Stand-Up Setting I've been re-thinking the Daily Coordination Meeting. I've been watching daily meetings. Often, the project participan...
