You've Got Issues

  Risk Management   Stakeholder Management   ProjectsAtWork  

Communicating problems to stakeholders is a tricky task for project managers. Calling attention to every issue can annoy them and even destroy their confidence in you and the team. Letting a critical issue slide can be worse. The key is to prioritize and take ownership of the resolutions.

The first step in effectively communicating about project problems is differentiating risks from issues. Risks are potential problems that haven’t happened yet; issues are problems that are currently happening on the project.        

If your organization is anything like the ones I’ve worked for over the years, it is willing to start projects with key roles unfilled, technical questions unanswered, business relationships unsecured and scope decisions unsettled. All these items have the potential to cause major problems for the project. However, if these risks are not currently causing problems then continuously drawing attention to them to stakeholders can be counterproductive, and annoying to boot.

If you find yourself in this situation, it’s much more effective to create a risk register, and do the best you can to document, quantify and think through how you can avoid those risks. Put your risk register in an accessible place, update it if something important changes, and then stop making it front and center in your project …

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