Often (too often in many organization) somebody does a great job of documenting and grading risks at the beginning of a project and then all that useful information lies dormant with other seldom used project artifacts.
The result is that when risks cross over to reality and become issues, the project team is ill prepared to deal with them and now everybody reverts to fire drill mode and forgets there ever was a risk management plan. In case you haven’t caught my tone on this one, I see this all as a very bad thing.
In my blog article “Grading Project Risk” I wrote about setting calculated metrics when you first document risks. This allows you to focus on the most likely to happen and adversely impact and better prioritize your risk management resources. However, life and projects rarely play out by the numbers and you will, at some point, find yourself staring down a former risk that is now a raging issue. After all, risks are only a tangible concern when they happen, and then they aren’t really risks anymore – you’ve stepped in it and it has attacked.
LET THE STORM HAPPEN!
When I teach classes that involve discussion of risks and issues, I often turn to the simplest of examples to get a point across. For much of my adult life, I lived in Western Michigan less than 30 miles from one of the Great Lakes. If you are planning on doing outdoor projects during the late-spring or summer months, you will need to add something to your risk register … weather. Lake Michigan has a notorious reputation for either swallowing up storms before they hit shore or adding to them in dramatic fashion. While your risk management strategy is pretty well summed up by “let the storm happen”, the impact to your project depends on how big the issue gets.
Rain out a single afternoon of that outdoor project and you haven’t lost much. Rain out a couple of days and the schedule just got tighter. Rain out a week (and that can and does happen) and you may lose time with sub-contractors in addition to falling behind in your own work.
Your “theoretical risk” just attacked in the form of an issue that will now cost you time and money you never planned on. And I’m not suggesting you could have managed it any differently; I’m merely pointing out that we often don’t really assess the change in impact when the risk crosses over to become an issue and then snowballs from there.
One other example of “when risks attack” comes readily to mind. I’ve long had a fascination with the Apollo 13 mission and the situation with the air scrubbers is an apt example. I’ve no doubt there were adequate scrubbers on board – but the risk mitigation only dealt with the assumed use per the mission plan.
When the LEM had to be used as a lifeboat for three rather than two, they were in there far longer than planned, and people under duress tend to breathe more and heavier, well we all know what happened. The lesson learned certainly caused NASA to think about a wider range of risk-based scenarios, but nobody could have predicted running out of the scrubbers like they did. Granted, this is an extreme example, but it does show what happens when risks breach the issue line and become active.
HOW BAD CAN IT GET?”
When you manage your risk portfolio, it might help to play out some “how bad could it get” scenarios and see if your issue response (notice I didn’t say risk response) will hold up. Risk management should never be a one or two dimensional thing. And it should never be done in isolation of what happens if and when that risk attacks in full force. For most of you, a rain-out doesn’t equal a small delay or, to use a baseball analogy, a double header the next day. It means a full-blown attack that could threaten your project if you aren’t prepared to deal with the issue instead of just the risk.
Bio:
Mark Moore has held multiple professional positions in IT and business for nearly three decades serving organizations both small and large, public and private. With over half that time as a project manager, he has successfully managed major initiatives spanning multiple years with a cost of over $3 Million and teams of over 250 people. He has been a Project Management Professional since 2002, served as President of the PMI Western Michigan Chapter, and presented at multiple NCPMI Annual Events. Mark holds a Masters of Education degree from Colorado State University with a concentration in Adult Education and Training. He is an experienced writer, speaker and presenter on project management and team building topics. Mark is the Principal Consultant for Broken Arrow Associates, LTD. He and his family live in a rural area outside of Raleigh, North Carolina.
https://insights.cermacademy.com/2013/10/29-the-great-pretenders-mark-moore/