Sunday, 03 October 2010 00:00

The Politics of Risk

Rate this item
(0 votes)

Cartoon on Risk

Risk is a risk in itself. It is risk for you if you dare bring it up. Have you ever identified the risk, in writing, that your boss' inherent inability to make decisions is going to sink the project? How about the company loss of market share will require laying off half the project team? Or, that the project manager has never had a successful project? These are CLMs (career limiting moves). Even mentioning such common risks as a company's inexperience in the project's domain is too risky to put in the risk register. It is as if management enjoys blissful ignorance and relishes the firefight that ensues. Cowboy mentality. Identifying risk, modeling mitigation plans, and compiling contingency are too boring compared to the thrill of disaster recovery.

It is Not Risk, it is Part of Doing Business

The sources are many fold. I have heard every reason for not putting risk in the register. "It is not a risk. That is the cost of doing business." That was a favorite one. It was in response to the risk that a majority of the key people might leave. The rumor was they were frustrated with the mismanagement and looking for new jobs. Instead of trying to improve working conditions or cross training people, both required admitting a problem existed, it was better to ignore the issue and try to convince people it was a normal part of business. It is hard to explain the rationale. Even trying to write it down in a coherent sentence is difficult.

Your Own Plans

I am a firm believer that good project managers assume authority—enough, at times, to hang themselves. Maybe this requires a second, private risk register where project managers maintain a private stash of mitigation and contingency plans. Somehow, they need to develop a set of plans to thwart the possibilities, even if through covert means. This will run opposed to management's desires, but it is the job of the project manager to plan for problems.

In the above case, I rebuilt the schedule and staffing plans to include two extra people and cross training everyone on the project. After the project successfully completed, I had an interesting conversation over beer. The cross training had an unintended effect—no one felt they could hurt the company by leaving, so they stayed waiting for a better opportunity. I took a beating for labor costs, but we delivered the project.

Be Assertive

If the project delivers on time and within budget, people forget that you were, depending on your gender, a female dog or rectal sphincter. The trick is to employ tools that remove the emotion. Address indecision by using action item logs or, better yet, corporate issue tracking systems. Use them from the first day on the job. This creates an expectation of accountability. Befriend sponsors, managers, and steering committee members to work as your allies—someone you can trust. Use them to apply peer pressure on managers that have trouble addressing open action items.

If the probability of a risk is too high, make it a task. It is a good practice that when a risk has more than 60 percent chance of occurrence it should be a task. Drop the threshold to 45 or 50 percent. This is better than padding the timeline, since padding cannot be removed. Tasks that are shown to be irrelevant can be, moving the entire schedule to the left.

Hiring third-party consultants to identify risks is mitigation in its own right. Leave the risk of identifying risk to someone that is expendable. This is a primary benefit of the outside consultants recovering projects. They are justified by their expertise, revered by management, and have free license to talk about the elephant in the room. The challenge is convincing management that there is a problem large enough to require outside help. Without management realizing that there is an irresolvable issue, little can be done to address it.

The Project Manager's Bottom Line

Risk is neither bad nor good—it is a fact of doing business. However, it requires management to admit there is a problem, understand how to address it, and, if it becomes an issue, how to lessen its impact. It takes forethought and planning. Too many managers operate with their heads in the sand and it becomes incumbent upon the project manager to lead and educate. It is true here, as in many areas of project management, the project manager is a leader managing up and down the chain of command.

Read 11653 times

Related items

  • Webinar Topic Example

    Nearly any topic that Todd Williams writes about or speaks on, he can do a webinar. You can find some of his "uni-directional" webinars on ProjectManagement.com (see partial listing below) or you can have a fully interactive session as in the audio clip.  The limitations of the session are based on the tool used. In this example, the ZOOM meeting tool was used and it did not allow recording of the video. The session was recorded on May 29, 2019 at 12:30PM London time (4:30AM Pacific). There were about a dozen people online, about half of them had their video turned on, and the meeting organizer (Jonathan Norman) moderated the call. 

    What Example Webinar: Eliminating Blame Covers

    Here are three uni-directional webinar examples posted on ProjectManagement.com (these are free to PMI Members)

  • Filling Execution Gaps: How Executives and Project Managers Turn Corporate Strategy into Successful Projects
    What Filling Execution Gaps Covers

    Filling Execution Gaps

    by Todd C. Williams
    ISBN: 978-1-5015-0640-6
    De G Press (DeGruyter), September 2017

    Project alignment, executive sponsorship, change management, governance, leadership, and common understanding. These six business issues are topics of daily discussions between executives, middle management, and project managers; they are the pivotal problems plaguing transformational leadership. Any one of these six, when improperly addressed, will hex a project's chances for success. And, they do—daily—destroying the ability companies to turn vision into value.

    Check it out on Amazon or the Filling Execution Gaps website

    Without the foundation of a common understanding of goals and core concepts, such as value being critical to success, communication stops and projects fail.

    Without change management, users fail to adopt project deliverables, value is lost, and projects fail.

    Without maintaining alignment between corporate goals and projects, projects miss their value targets and projects fail.

    Without an engaged executive sponsor, scope increases, goals drift, chaos reigns, value is lost, and projects fail.

    Without enough governance, critical connections are not made, steps are ignored, value is overlooked, and projects fail.

    Too much governance slows progress, companies cannot respond to business pressures, value drowns in bureaucracy, and projects fail.

    Without strong leadership defining the vision and value, goals are not set, essential relationships do not form, teams do not develop, essential decisions are not made, and projects fail.

  • Filling Execution Gaps: Building Success-Focused Organizations

    Executives define vision, strategy, and goals to advance the business. Projects enable companies to meet those goals. Between strategy and projects, there is a lot of work to be done—work that lays the foundation for project and operational success. Through experience and research, six common gaps exist in organizations that inhibit project success—an absence of common understanding, disengaged executive sponsors, misalignment with goals, poor change management, ineffective governance, and lackluster leadership.

  • Get Recognized as a Leader: Four Core Leadership Actions

    Leaders make decisions. This requires a core set of actions to gather the best information, hear out the concerns of others, and making a decision that everyone will follow—even if there is not unanimous agreement with the decision. Although there are hundreds of actions leaders must take, there are four core actions that all great leaders do—listening, dialog and discussion, selling a vision, and eliminating blame. This session will discuss those actions in a roundtable format that we call a "What Would You Do?" session. In these sessions, the presenter acts as a moderator spending 10 to 15 minutes per topic working with the audience talking about what the action is, how to best do it, and hearing from the group on how they have carried out the action. This brings significant audience interaction, involvement, and broader education. 

  • Build Your Leadership Style: Six Leadership Strategies

    Salespeople, Project managers, and business leaders, to name a few, need to change their leadership style for every situation. Situational leadership is more important for these roles than nearly any other role in an organization. Central to this leadership style is commanding the six core strategies—directive, expert, consensus, engaging, coaching, and affiliative. These sets leaders the foundation for building the most appropriate leadership style for the conditions surrounding the current events, people in the room, and external conditions. In this roundtable session, which we refer to as a "What Would You Do?" format, the audience debates the use of each strategy as the presenter poses various conditions and dilemmas that face leaders daily. This creates an educational, interactive and entertaining presentation that builds cohesiveness in your group and relationships that last long after your event.

Leave a comment

Filling Execution Gaps

Available Worldwide

Filling Exectution Gaps cover

Filling Execution Gaps is available worldwide. Below are some options.

 

PG DirectLogo
Limited Time Price $20.99
Amazon logo
Book or Kindle
Flag of the United States Canadian Flag Flag of the United Kingdom Irish Flag Deutsche Flagge
Drapeau Français Bandiera Italiana PRC flag
Japanese flag
Bandera de España
Flag of India
Bandera de México
Bandeira do Brasil
Flag of Australia
Vlag van Nederland
DeG Press Logo
Barnes and Noble Logo
Books a Million Logo
Booktopia Logo
Worldwide: Many other
book sellers worldwide.

Rescue The Problem Project

Internationally acclaimed

Image of RPP

For a signed and personalized copy in the US visit the our eCommerce website.

Amazon logo
Buy it in the United States Buy it in Canada Buy it in the United Kingdom
Buy it in Ireland Buy it in Germany Buy it in France
Buy it in Italy Buy it in the PRC
Buy it in Japan
Book sellers worldwide.

Other's References

More Info on Project Recovery

Tell me More!

Please send me more information
on fixing a failing project.

Upcoming Events

Sitemap