This newsletter has focused on Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), which applies to all businesses, and some would say to non-profits as well as those profit-making enterprises. In this article we will bring a different perspective to Risk Management from a particular sector of the economy. Continue reading
In the previous posts in this thread we looked at various types and classes of uncertainties and discussed how and when they are likely to be identified and selected for inclusion in a project’s Risk Register. In the final post of this series, we will look at how to build a repository that can streamline this process by storing uncertainties and qualifying information about them in a structure that facilitates querying and filtering them.
In the first two posts (Managing Project Risk the PMI Way and Building a Risk Inventory To Manage Project Risks) in this thread we looked at two classes of project uncertainties—‘macro’ uncertainties, whose impacts are felt at the project level, and ‘micro’ uncertainties, whose impact is discernible at the level of individual Work Packages. Given the PMI project management lifecycle, these uncertainties become concrete and must be dealt with at two different points. ‘Macro’ uncertainties must be dealt with, or at least must begin to be dealt with, with during the Initiation process group. In fact, many of these uncertainties must be identified and management of them started before Initiation even begins. ‘Micro’ uncertainties can only be identified and materialized fully as activities in Planning are occurring. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
As an enthusiast of LinkedIn’s group discussions, I have seen and contributed to a fair number of discussions on risk within project management.
One thing that strikes me is how the understanding of risk differs depending on the context within a project, and how often these differences lead to confusion. The participants in one particularly lively discussion relentlessly pursued lengthy dialogs stating and restating their positions only because they were actually talking about two different kinds of risk. Continue reading