There are times when the project manager will be subjected to the long list of potential risks brought to them by their team. Handling these issues rather than summarily dismissing the item being brought to their attention as input from a hypercritical or doom-centric team member is important for project success and team morale. If […]
We perform risk audits on projects to ascertain whether we are deviating from the desired budget, schedule, and quality levels we specified at the start of the project. At the 50,000 foot level, risk auditing looks like the following: Define the problem Choose an audit team leader Choose an audit team or let the leader […]
Okay – so we have worked with our team and have documented a list of risks, and have performed a qualitative or quantitative assessment – perhaps even both of these. Now what? One such risk management failure then happens when we place the risk register on a shelf somewhere and the subsequent planned actions are […]
Program trigger events were discussed in our last blog. We can set up a program data base that has inbuilt triggers or we can pick up on the issue if we build these triggers into frequent product development reviews. We feel the project/program manager is the primary party to monitor for trigger events. Secondarily, the […]
A contingency in project management is a reaction plan to an untoward event; in short, we plan ahead for the failure of a given task. In order for a trigger to “fire,” we must set a threshold value that activates the trigger; otherwise, the trigger should never fire. Thresholds can be set based on financial, […]
Risks need to be assessed in regard to their business impacts, so that business decisions can be made promptly. Strategies should be built and decided based on the quantitative value of the risk. Managers must decide on whether to spend $500,000 to avoid a delay in a project. How long that delay is impacts the […]
Many organizations have a series of activities or processes (design reviews, analyses, verifications, validations, etc.) that they go through to produce the end product or service. The work will start with some kind of development process, which may be a matter of days, months or years, depending on the complexity of the product or service. […]
The trigger is a new concept to those acquainted with the FMEA approach to problem elimination. The trigger event (or threshold) is how we know we need to invoke our risk reduction activities and is direct responsibility of the person monitoring. Risk Response and Contingency Budgets Each risk dollar amount at stake is multiplied by […]
The SEV, PROB, and CTRL fields quantify the amount of risk to which the project is exposed. The higher the number, the more risk to the project. This information is used to prioritize and generate action to reduce or eliminate (transfer) the risk. Also, we wish to identify the detection—how do you know the risk […]
We recommend a modified version of the FMEA approach to assessing the risk. The approach is tailored to the needs of project and program managers. We will model the time line as a control plan with minimal controls other than the typical tollgate reviews and, perhaps, team meetings. We know from personal experience that treating […]