Last month we looked at how agile methods provide multiple opportunities for embracing proactive risk management. This month’s article extends risk management beyond the project manager role and introduces the benefits of making it more of a collaborative team exercise.
We've already looked at the opportunities agile methods offer for proactive risk management and examined the benefits of engaging the whole team in risk management through collaborative games. As our agile risk management series continues, we walk through those games and explains how to engage a team in the first three of the six risk management steps.
Why do so many project managers fail to deal with risks on their projects? In this article, we examine some of the reasons and explore some ways to tackle the problem.
Agile methods incorporate many mechanisms for dealing with late-breaking changes that also lend themselves to proactively responding to risks. Here we explore how these methods make effective risk management easier to implement.
There's no problem with the standard equation for risk, but it’s only part of the story. In this article, we look beyond impact multiplied by probability and think about risk trends over time.
One of the unsung PMO functions is managing risk. There are a lot of aspects of risk management where the PMO can provide tangible support to project managers in their endeavors. In this article, we explore some of that support in terms of identification, analysis and response.
This 23 point, 5 page risk management plan addresses 6 categories of project risk. It is particularly good for non-technical projects. It's simple, yet solid approach enables you to create a thoughtful and defensible risk management plan within a short timeframe.
This document describes the purpose of risk management and provides an overview of the general process for the management of risks within a project.
The Risk Management Grid is a technique to identify potential risk events that could impact one of more of the project’s Seven Win Conditions. Importantly, it also serves to decide how those events will be prevented or mitigated.
This document describes the purpose of risk management and provides an overview of the general process for managing risks within a project. Use it to capture and codify processes and procedures that need to be undertaken to initiate, act upon and review risks within your projects.
The risk register records details of all the risks identified at the start and during the life of the project, their grading in terms of likelihood of occurring and seriousness of impact on the project, initial plans for mitigating each high level risk and subsequent results.
The most important contributor to successful risk management isn’t processes or tools, which are important, but an organizational culture that is risk-aware and encourages people to take the right risks. This can be achieved by addressing cultural aspects up front or allowing it to emerge naturally by putting a supportive infrastructure in place first.
You project managers know that you are held accountable for a heck of a lot. Here are your responsibilities in Powerpoint slide format so you can impress your boss, co-workers, subordinates, parents, customers and clients.
Making a single person responsible for managing risk on a project is a major risk in itself. The fact is, wherever there are project objectives there are risks that might affect them. And the best person to identify and manage a particular risk is the one who owns the objective that could be affected.
Use this color-coded form to rate each project risk by probability/impact and priority level.
Do you need a tracking tool for risk management? Click here.
Risk management on projects has become a doom-and-gloom exercise in finding all of the bad things that might go wrong and coming up with plans of what to do about them. Project budgets inflate and schedules extend as mitigation and insurance strategies grow and contingency budgets balloon. We highlight the negatives to such an extent that we forget to focus on the positives. Time to turn that frown upside down...
How can an organization tell whether its management of risk is good enough? This framework describes four levels of capability based on four attributes: culture, process, experience and application.
Risk meetings are under-appreciated--but a vital part of risk management during project execution. A regularly scheduled risk meeting can help keep risks managed properly, and it is the project manager’s job to bring the resources to the table and help assist the project by naming and mitigating risks.
Many risk management guides describe a mitigation strategy that allocates funding and schedule margin for when a risk “comes true.” A better approach is to “buy down” the risk before it turns into an issue. Here is an example based on the U.S. Department of Defense’s approach.
Not only is this document a practical lesson in the principles and approach of a project management office (hopefully, yours!), but it could also double as boilerplate verbage for the risk assessment section of responses to RFPs as well as reports to the client.
This spreadsheet will help you align your project efforts with the specific risks you face on your project, to make estimating and resource management more accurate and effective.
Risk analysis can feel like looking into a crystal ball to tell the future. Having a careful and detailed approach to qualitative analysis can stop the “guessitative” analysis.
Risk management has a bad name. "Risk", like "politics", is a word weighted with negative baggage. When we hear the word, we view it as focussing on problems. Risk management on projects can become a doom-and-gloom exercise in finding all of the bad things that might go wrong, and coming up with plans of what to do about them.
No company wants to halt its operations under extenuating circumstances for any length of time. Use this risk management document template to create a specific plan of backup and recovery procedures so that work can flow uninterrupted when change strikes.
The project is done and implemented. Now it's time to rate its effectiveness! This form will help.
Implementation has taken place. Now it's time to ask your client as well as your project team some burning questions: What worked well? What could have been done better? What recommendations do you have for future projects?
If you need a simple, straightforward project plan template for an IT project, we have what you are looking for.
There are not a lot of presentations that actively engage the advanced project manager. If only there was course that dealt with a project management topic from an advanced perspective, one that allowed for real application with course attendees...something like a PM game!
A new survey from Project Management Institute identifies key trends in project, program and portfolio management, including a renewed focus on talent development and increased use of agile methods. The results also point to critical success factors, among them clearly defining expected benefits, ensuring top-level management support, and creating a career path for project participants.
Few project leaders want to spend the up-front time and money to actually put together a risk management plan, but it truly needs to be your first step in effectively managing risks on your project. Your planning needs to include four steps in order to be effective and in order to be a "sellable" tool in your PM process.
This super-comprehensive project plan in Microsoft Word is chock full of information on how to plan and manage a data warehouse project. It covers the gamut in DW project planning and control activities and will teach you a lot about data warehouse architectures, tools, risk management, development activities, quality management and the like. Enjoy the read!
The project status report is a document used by project managers for formal regular reporting on the status of a project to the project steering committee, project sponsor, stakeholders, or senior management, depending on the size of the project. Having a good one is essential. Use our template to help you get started.
Project managers hate risks. But is this always a good thing? When projects are established, there's a lot of focus on budgets, schedules and scope (and the relationships between those constraints). Here, we argue that there should be more conscious focus on the role that risks play in that equation--and explore why you shouldn’t always try to minimize negative risks.
Why do sponsors refuse to provide contingency for risks? It’s not going to go away, you know! It's time to talk about reserves--the amount of time and money that needs to be put aside to cope with the risks on a project. In particular, we want to look at the mindset of the sponsor who refuses to acknowledge this contingency in the budget and schedule.
Managing uncertainty is one of the most important challenges facing project managers, but many have no consistent process for dealing with risks, large or small. One helpful step is to take a page from Agile practices and pay more attention to the size of team tasks and the quality of our conversations about them.
Are you staffing your risk management team? This candidate evaluation matrix (Excel) coupled with the sample job description document (Word) will point you in the right direction for finding the ideal risk reviewer.
Going into a project with an attitude of "We can do anything!" is enthusiastic, but foolhardy. The risk management process will help you identify, quantify and reduce the risks (problems) that may affect your project.
Would managing risk be easier and more effective if we adopted the IKEA approach to documenting the risk process, using fewer words, clear illustrations and simple tools?
What’s the best training for a project manager who already has the basics? Here's what you need to keep in mind when trying to advance your knowledge--and your career.
The RFP you just got is asking for a distributed generic billing system. Use this comprehensive document as a framework to write your own proposal for building and implementing a winner of a distributed application.
Here is an outline of a project plan. You put in your information; we'll help you organize your thoughts.
This document is a checklist for assessment of whether a project plan meets an acceptable standard. This standard will vary from company to company, so feel free to tailor this form accordingly to meet your needs.
The Black Swan concept warns us to expect the unexpected, but when it comes managing risk we should be careful to use the term properly and not dilute it through misunderstanding. If we mistakenly think that risks with very low probability and high impact are Black Swans, then we remain unprepared and vulnerable to genuinely unknowable unknowns.
So you have identified the risks on your project, written them in the risk register and moved on to other, more important things on your project. STOP! You have only completed one of the initial steps of the risk management process. You still have some important work to do.
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Any project can run into unforeseen risks. Managing these risks can take some time, but it is well spent. An Agile approach can help because the tenets of risk management are already built into the process. Here are some tips and considerations.
In many ways, starting a new Project Portfolio Office is easier than inheriting a PPO that is already in process. However, the risk assessment process is essentially the same. Assessing risk of project delays and failures on the PPO basket of projects, at a minimum, should consider six areas. Find out what they are--and plenty more crucial risk management information--inside.
Matrix organizations have inherent weaknesses and pitfalls, but a project manager can transform those weaknesses for the benefit of the project. Here's some help.
To manage risk effectively on our projects, we need to deal with uncertainty, understand why it matters, follow a structured process, and take into account the human side that influences judgment and decisions.
Issue management is a critical aspect of effective project management, but one that often gets overlooked or given less attention than is needed. While risk management is often perceived as being critical, it is in the management of issues that risks are actually identified and managed. Which means that ignore issue management is, well, risky…
