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f you’ve read any of my other pieces, you know I’m an advocate for defining and managing risk (and opportunity) on projects and in organizations. And you know by “managing” I mean the active, vigilant monitoring of what is going on vs. what you may have anticipated. It makes sound business sense and it ends up saving you, your teams, and your management a whole lot of headaches later. Continue reading
We deal with appetites and thresholds every day, both personally and professionally. Project risk management is no exception and knowing your appetite and threshold may save your project a lot of grief.
When managing project risks (or any risks for that matter), I’ve found that there are always two versions of appetite and threshold. The first is what I’ll call the “perceived” level and the second is the “actual” level. This may sound like splitting hairs, but I’ve found multiple times on projects that they both do exist and always come into play at some point.
There is a risk on your project few of you have documented. It’s a big problem in any organization when it happens, and it happens all too often. It’s known as “groupthink” and Wikipedia defines it as:
“A psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people, in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an incorrect or deviant decision-making outcome. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative ideas or viewpoints, and by isolating themselves from outside influences.” 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
If you’ve worked on projects for very long, you’ve no doubt heard somebody (usually a manager or executive who just read an article) say, “We have to identify our risks! We must know what is coming and how to avoid it!”
And the exercise involves an all-hands session where people throw out ideas, somebody documents it, and the results get filed away with other artifacts that never see the light of day again. A bit of a doomsday outlook you say? I would agree had I not seen some variation of this play out over and over again. Continue reading