What approach do you take in your projects when you don’t know what you don’t know? Saving Changes...
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PANKAJ KUMAR JOSHIGeneral Manager| Transrail Lighting LimitedNainital, Uttrakhand, India
Normally management keeps reserve to manage it. PM needs to take permission for that. Apart from that there cannot be any plan for unknown unknown till it comes.
If nothing is available, create a workaround. Saving Changes...
Unknown unknowns are taken care of using reserves set aside by management for unidentified risk. As much as possible efforts should be made to focus on the known unknowns since this can be controlled, prevented,mitigated, anticipated etc, like Pankaj stated "if nothing is available, create a work around" Saving Changes...
Jason GrabowskiOwner / Master Scheduler| Baseline Achieved, LLCFredericksburg, Va, United States
The two previous postings did a great job hitting the unknown-unknown risks. So I will hit this one from a different perspective. Often times in multiyear, multimillion dollar projects, a project team doesn’t know enough of the project details to conduct detailed planning beyond the next 120-150 days. You just don’t know what you don’t know. So the team can plan and schedule the project using the rolling wave concept.
With the rolling wave concept, detailed planning is conducted for work packages that are expected to begin within the next 120-150 days. Beyond the next 120-150 days, planning packages are identified. Planning packages are simply tasks that identify the future work at a high level. The tasks are still linked and sequenced so that forecasts can still be generated and a critical path can still be analyzed. And the tasks are tagged as planning packages so that the team is aware that detailed planning still needs to occur.
As the project is executed and the team gets closer to the planning packages, more details will begin to flush out. This will allow the team to conduct additional detailed planning. Thus, you are accepting that you simply don’t know what you don’t know and you structure your project planning process to account for that fact. Saving Changes...
