Documents & process
Ball-in-Court
The discipline that at any moment, every open item has exactly one owner — the person in whose court the ball currently sits. Not two people, and never a department.
“It’s with the consultant” is the phrase that hides the failure, and it works because it is true. The ball genuinely is in their court. But it is a STATUS, not an excuse: somebody on your side still owns chasing it, escalating it, and serving notice if the delay becomes a delay.
And in a delay claim, “we were waiting for them” is worth almost nothing without the record of having chased. The ball being in someone else’s court never removed your obligation to know how long it had been there.