by Anthony Joseph
What do you know about Risk Management in Projects? Today, I’ll love to share 4 ideas around this matter:
1. Risk Management isn’t static and planning for it but not closing the loop will make it impossible to have risks under control so please ensure you follow all the steps of the process: Plan, Identify, Qualitative Risk Analysis or Quantitative Risk Analysis, Risk Responses and Control Risk.
2. Remember that there are 4 approaches to handle negative risks: avoid, accept, mitigate and transfer. You tranfer a risk when you buy a car insurance. You accept a risk when decide doing nothing if an asteroid hits Earth. You avoid when you change a vendor that didn’t followed instructions and aren’t adding value anymore. Finally, risks are mitigated when you have a plan to reduce the impact partially if materialized.
3. Simple projects could have dozens of risks while complex projects could have hundreds of risks. Suspect on a projects with very few risks. Isn’t real, meaning risks are hidden and will surprise the organization at any moment. Step back and push to trigger the process… that will enable the team to disposition them according to #2.
4. Risk Management is as important as Scope, Time and Cost Management. Don’t get trapped prioritizing those 3 on top of all the rest of areas. Risks not well handled will derail any of those areas causing projects to fail or deviate.
Do you have tips to share? I would love to read them in comments to enrich this note. For sure readers will appreciate it.
Do you want to know more about risks? Please let me know. We can talk more about negative and even positive risks, tools used and best practices.
Sources: PMI.org / Forbes.com
Image credits: Getty and 2023 PMI CR Summit
About Tony
I’m a believer in the people and how doing the best and helping others elevates our world. Also, blessed with a wonderful family that inspires me to give my 110%. I has been an IT leader, Program Manager, PMO lead and Project Manager passionate about enabling teamwork and used to achieve results on fast pace environments. Focused, strategic and eager learner with 1 engineering, 2 Master degrees, a PMP, a Green Belt, 25 years of experience and strong acumen on: Life in Science, manufacturing, process optimization, semiconductors and technology arenas. I had the privilege of serving 25+ global companies as employee or consultant and delivered 500+ projects/programs, including creating PMOs and IT organizations from scratch or moving them to the next level. Finally, Tony has practitioned as mentor, coach and trainer for more than 20y.