Understanding Obstacles

There will be obstacles on every project. You will have issues!  It's inevitable.  

There will be people, senior people, who, when they come across an obstacle or issue, will act as if it’s the very first time they’ve ever come across an issue on a project in their entire life. Don’t believe the hype. Know that there will be obstacles on every project. Forecast them and prepare for them. Finding solutions to them is your job. It’s called mitigating risk. First, let the team and client know that obstacles will arise.

You won’t know all of the obstacles that are going to trip you up. It’s practically impossible to know them all, but you can get a handle on some of the more obvious ones by conducting a postmortem at the end of the previous project. With that being said, you need to have your team in the mindset of being proactive and solution-oriented when the obstacles do arise.  And when they do, if you are prepared, you can come to the table with solutions, rather than questions.

 At NASA they teach the astronauts to think in terms of “What’s the next thing that could kill me?” (6) Then they prepare for this by proactively solving issues that haven’t yet occurred and may never occur. Although what we do is not rocket science, the mindset of a producer is to keep an eye toward the next obstacle that could trip up the project and to not be caught by surprise when it does.

Use this foresight to question the information given to you when building an LOE, proposal, or any other document that binds you to the success or failure of hitting your company’s margins.