“Whose turn is it to buy? Mine? Yours?”

The famous phrase heard in countless restaurants on any given evening among friends, “Whose turn is it to buy?”

Can the same question be asked when dealing with trouble in your project?  Or does the question sound more like, “How are we paying for this?”

In our personal lives, things happen to us all the time.  Trouble sneaks up on us and causes us to have to figure out new ways to pay for whatever the result might be.  For this past week I have been working at home watching new windows being installed in this older home we bought on the lake.  Each day a new set of “trouble” has been found and now we are faced with some serious repair work before the windows can be finished.  This has led us to look at our personal finances to see where the money will come from to pay for this.

Often times in our project lives we don’t have the luxury of finding new money to pay for troubled events.  Many times I have worked for clients that insist on not including management or contingency reserves into their budget estimates.  Other clients seem to have a never ending pot of money to cover the unexpected items that come up.

So where do the extra funds come from?  I believe this is very organizationally specific and depends highly on the past successes or failures they have experienced.  Company culture and policy have a lot to do with decision as well.  Some companies are just not used to budgeting for the unexpected and don’t, and when the team finds themselves into some trouble and required assistance from outside the organization, often they are left asking, “Who is going to pay for this?”

I would love to hear from you all on how the various organizations you work with handle this issue.  How do you realistically account for those items that will come up and extra funding will be required.

At MTI Learning we are working with the teams to train and coach them on the handling of troubled projects, on turn-around skills, and how to conduct recovery efforts.  This all helps, but when things still happen, what are your methods for paying for it?  Where do you find your extra pot of gold?

Looking forward to hearing from you!

“B”