All Risks Great & Small

Garry L. Booker, PMP, CSM, is a contract project manager and Agile Lead. He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  Agile   Estimating   Risk Management   Scrum   ProjectsAtWork  

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.

Traditional thinking about project uncertainty is exemplified by a 40-page chapter in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide). Chapter 11 — Project Risk Management — describes a process-heavy approach with dozens of inputs, tools, techniques and outputs. Because the PMBOK Guide is just that — a guide, project managers are free to implement any or all of these approaches, and many chose to implement none. Instead, they forge ahead with no identifiable risk management process, or perhaps they use PMBOK-based management for a few large risk items with no identifiable process for a multitude of small risk items.

Yet managing uncertainty is possibly the most important challenge facing project managers. Uncertainty is present in all projects, large and small. The Agile community has made significant advances in dealing with uncertainty, particularly in product development. What can we learn from the Agile movement that can be applied broadly to managing uncertainty in all projects?

There are some excellent nuggets in …

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