Project Management for Trainers: Stop "Winging It" and Get Control of Your Training Projects

The Secret to Success

“He no longer trusts you because you insist on telling him the truth about his project.” I overheard this strange statement from an internal person to the vendor of outsourced work. As the quotation illustrates, the secret to success with managing external vendors is not about a detailed, unbreakable contract. Rather, it is about the quality of communication. People make an outsourcing relationship work through frequent, clear communication that is filled with integrity. The core capacity that drives the effectiveness of communication is trust. Figure 8.1 shows a model that explains this dynamic using a causal loop diagram (a technique used to document systems thinking) that you saw in chapter 6.

Figure 8.1. Causal loop ...