Identifying the risks that matter most to your project
Even the best managed projects rarely run exactly to plan. Inevitably events will occur that have the potential to derail your project unless they’re dealt with effectively. So identifying the specific risks that matter most to your project is a key tool in anticipating and dealing with these events.
A good number of important risks will be immediately apparent – especially to a seasoned project manager. Particularly valuable will be your prior experience of managing similar projects, since many risks are likely to reoccur. Work with your team to draw up a list of potential risks, using the traditional dimensions of project delivery:
- What threats are there to a quality delivery? This includes risks around gold-plating your delivery, as well as falling short of what’s required.
- What threats are there to keeping to agreed project costs? Here you’ll be concentrating on overruns, since under-spend is not that common.
- What threats are there to planned delivery timescales? Again, overrun is the typical concern, since projects don’t have a habit of finishing ahead of schedule.
Once an initial pass of the more obvious risks and issues has been undertaken, we recommend validating and expanding this list using the following three techniques:
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Handy techniques for identifying risks:
1. Assumptions review. Consider how safe each important assumption underpinning your plan is.
2. Lessons learned. Look at what’s gone wrong with other (similar) projects in your neighbourhood.
3. Check-lists. Work through pre-defined lists of things to think about. |
A brilliant project manager won’t end up looking around in amazement wondering: “what happened?” If you actively manage your risks you’ll be giving yourself the best possible chance of side-stepping the avoidable things that threaten your project. Remember: if you don’t attack risks they’ll attack you!
Methods Consulting's comment
In our experience, there can be no substitute for identifying project risks upfront – and agreeing ownership of these between the various stakeholders on a project. With this in mind, Methods Consulting generally uses a weighted risk matrix, where both the likelihood of a risk occurring and the potential impact of the risk should it occur are each given a score of 1-5. The two scores are then multiplied together to give an overall importance out of 25, after which the risk is then assigned an owner, with whom a mitigation strategy will be agreed. We have found that this provides a structured way of prioritising risks, and for ensuring that a clear plan exists for managing these going forward.