How Effective Risk Management Requires Adaptability & Resilience

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile   Risk Management  

Most project managers excel at identifying risks. But how well do they mitigate and manage risks?

The project managers I know do some combination of these risk activities:

• Identify known risks in advance or at the start of the project, often with a workshop with the team. These are the known risks.
• Continue to identify and manage risks while the project continues. Often, these are the unknown risks, or risks that changed.
• Report risks at the end of the project so other people can learn from our work.

That’s all great. And it’s not enough.

To effectively manage risks, we need adaptability and resilience—for ourselves, our teams, and our organizations. While many people think adaptability and resilience are the same, they are not. And when we use adaptability and resilience to manage risk, we can create products that satisfy our managers and customers—and improve the team’s environment.

Let’s start with what I mean by adaptability.

Adaptability
When we are adaptable, we can see how a given state changes. Here are some typical state changes I see a lot in projects:

• The team’s cycle time is unexpectedly longer for many of their items. Things take longer to finish.
• The team’s WIP increases. Sometimes, that’s because the work takes longer than the team predicted; but sometimes, that’s …

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