Category Archives: Projects@Risk™ – Malcolm Peart

#109 – GET THE HINT, SO YOUR PROJECT DOESN’T END UP IN PIECES – MICHAEL STRATTON

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My brother and I LOVED baseball. We grew up in Oklahoma but we could watch Harry Michael StrattonCaray on WGN or Bob Horner and the Braves on TBS just about every day of the week. We collected baseball cards. We bought the Beckett magazine that told you the value of a given baseball card. We were OBSESSED.

My mother came home from work one day. She gave firm instructions to my brother and me to clean our rooms. We were so into the baseball the game at the time we just let her orders bounce off our shoulders.

Five minutes passed. Continue reading →

#106 – CRESCENT WRENCH VS. BOX WRENCH – MARK MOORE

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Odd title I know, but do you expect anything different from me?  I had this thought a while OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAback – a memory of past busted up knuckles to be clear – that my family didn’t have many tools while I was growing up.  If we had any specific size box or open-end wrenches, they were few and far between and probably in pretty bad shape.  No, when I was a boy and I needed to do something on my bicycle, I had to rely on that good old standard, the adjustable crescent wrench.   Continue reading →

#106 – WORLD HAS LIMITED RESOURCES … IS INTELLIGENCE ONE OF THEM – MALCOLM PEART

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Malcom Peart pixIt has been suggested that Stone Age man had a higher IQ than today’s modern homo sapiens. “That cannot be” says the modern man but, if one thinks about such an assault on our modern-day ego and self-confessed superiority, the alleged ‘primitive’ man was able to survive in extreme conditions, travelled the planet and set the foundations for today’s societies. Continue reading →

#102 – ASSUMPTIONS: WHAT YOU KNOW MAY KILL YOU – HOWARD WIENER

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In his post Cause of Death:  Invalid Assumptions, my colleague Mark Moore observed Howard Wiener Pixthat project risk management often excludes consideration of underlying assumptions on which event probabilities and prospective impacts are based.  Obviously, we cannot operate without relying on what we know or we would have to reinvent the wheel every time we had to go somewhere.  On the other hand, failing to challenge what we believe we know or to consider the possibility that there are relevant factors about which we have no idea (so-called “unknown unknowns”) can result in vastly underestimating risks or missing opportunities.  This article will raise questions more than it will provide answers but it does suggest that some changes in PM discipline can help reduce the risks our assumptions create. Continue reading →

#101 – CAUSE OF DEATH: INVALID ASSUMPTIONS – MARK MOORE

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As seasoned project managers, we are very familiar with identifying and managing risks (though too often, the activity stops with identifying and we “wing it” from there).  I’ve OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAwritten here on CERM Insights and elsewhere about assigning a weighted grade to risks based on the likelihood of the risk becoming an issue and the impact to your project should that happen.  From there you manage the higher graded risks more closely as they embody the possibility of causing the most damage to your project and hindering the success.

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