Everyone Did Their Job. The Project Was Still Six Weeks Late.
There is a specific kind of meeting that follows a hardware project slipping its date, and it is one of the least productive hours in corporate life. Everyone is in the room. The vendor shows the build finished on schedule. The forwarder shows the container was booked and sailed on schedule. The broker shows the entry was filed and the goods released. The installer turned up on the day they were asked to turn up. Every party has a timestamp, every timestamp is clean, and the racks are still empty six weeks after the go-live date. So the meeting ends the way these meetings always end. Someone says it was a perfect storm. Someone says we need better visibility. Nobody says the true thing, which is that the delay did not happen inside anyone's scope. It happened in the space between scopes, and that space had no owner. The gap between the purchase order and the rack A procurement dashboard tracks two events with any confidence: the day the purchase order was signed, and the day the go...