Project Management in Real Life

Holding a Risk Assessment meeting prior to implementing a modification to a process or system that could result in loss of productivity to a business unit. Invite business units with a stake in the implementation. Encourage feedback to tear up your plan and look for any holes in it. You need to really know your stuff when you hold a risk assessment meeting because they can get intense. The meeting is your time to shine and field questions. Show what you are made of. Be confident and never get defensive or offended by the reviewers. You should have a subject matter expert on your team to help you out when a discussion gets out of hand. Sometimes the risk assessment meeting has hecklers to distract from the productivity of the meeting and your job is to shut that person down diplomatically to keep the meeting on track.

The risk assessment document should include an implementation timeline giving a summary and anticipated duration of the activity that is being performed. Build your timeline with appropriate padding to allow you some extra time should you run into issues or take a little longer than anticipated. Break down your timeline into half hour increments to gauge your progress. The Go/No-go decision needs to be placed at a critical point in your timeline to evaluate your current progress to determine if the implementation is on track or not on track with numerous issues encountered warranting a back-out of the implementation. The plan should also include names and contact numbers of key people that you might need to reach out to at anytime during the implementation.

(Note - this article was originally written by Drake Settsu and published on DrakeSettsu.BlogSpot.com in December 2013)