Vellum & Razor Blades

How does it feel to work on projects? There's a slight shift that changes the experience completely.

Most teams think about their deliverables as outputs. The drawings they produce, the model they hand over or the schedule they publish.

But every deliverable a project produces also becomes someone else's input. What the surveyor confirms becomes the design team's starting point. What the design team models becomes the cost consultant's basis for pricing and the fabricator's background for shop drawing coordination. The coordination in the specs and shop drawings is what the contractor builds from.

Once you see deliverables in this way, the project stops looking like a list of tasks and starts looking like a choreography of collaborations. Each handoff carries someone's progress and kickstarts another series of guided steps.

This is what scripting a project means, it's not setting a series of tasks, it's the choreography of who carries what to whom, by when and at what level of quality.

Teams that script their work well make the rest of the work easier for everyone downstream. They tend not to produce so much work that needs unwinding later because the connections are visible and coordinated.

The layers of a project run deep and they live in each of those handoffs. They are far easier to script before anyone opens a model than to try to repair after the fact.

The free Delivery Control Scorecard helps you see where your next project is starting in control and any areas that may be prone to causing friction.

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