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Today’s topic is entailed to identifying risks on projects and identifying the appropriate steps to take to identify and track these risks to a resolution. Enjoy!
As a new project manager, it can be sometimes hard to initially identify if something can be potentially classified as a risk. In any type of meeting with stakeholders, someone can bring up a potential risk and it can easily be missed. An experienced project manager can typically identify a risk pretty easily and usually can detect a risk a mile away. This article is more for the new project managers who are managing a project for the first time on their own and need some guidance in identifying if something can be a potential risk to a project.
“It will be important for you to understand their concerns from a holistic standpoint and see how you can work with the project team to address and solve for these areas.”
- When attending any stakeholder meetings, actively listen to the conversation in the room. As conversations with stakeholders go from discussing the problem that they are trying to solve for, all the way to designing, developing, testing and deploying the solution, the stakeholders will bring up concerns that they have that need to be solved for. These types of meetings are one of the easiest ways to capture and document areas of concern that stakeholders believe are critical to the success of the project. An example can be where a stakeholder says “our design doesn’t consider the Order Management Interface” as a concern in meeting. If you take a step back and go look at the requirements, you may see that the Order Management Interface was a key requirement that was never captured in the original requirements. At this point, if it’s a “must have” requirement, then this should be documented as a risk and brought up to the project leadership team to understand the criticality of the requirement.
- Have daily check-ins with the project team. By speaking to the project team daily, you will be able to hear what types of blockers or impediments are preventing them from completing their tasks. Typically, these impediments and blockers are identified as issues if they are not captured on a timely basis. It will be important to capture these on a timely basis so you can escalate this to right stakeholder for resolution.
- Identify potential tasks that can be delayed. Typically, tasks that are highly complex or have long completion times are the most prone to have delays. Additionally, tasks that are dependent on other tasks being completed may have a higher chance of being delayed if the prior task is not completed in a timely manner. It’s important to investigate these tasks to identify potential risks and mitigation strategies.
- Analyze actual costs vs. planned costs and identify variances. When doing financial estimates planning, the plan is based on what you expect to spend for the project, whether in terms of labor hours, in terms of equipment or even software license costs. As a project manager, its important to identify the actual costs vs. the planned costs and analyze the variances. If the design phase had a higher planned cost but lower actual costs, its important to understand the reasoning for this, or vice versa. Project leadership will always be happy if you spend less than expected because you end up saving them money. But, if actual costs are higher than planned costs, that may pose a risk to the overall project financials if the dollar amount is significant.
- See where the push back is. At times, project leadership or stakeholders can push back on functionality needed or make statements that make you wonder if the project is actually fulfilling the need of the stakeholders who are involved in it. Of course when stakeholders push back, this can pose a risk if not resolved/addressed in a timely manner. As a project manager, it is important to meet with these stakeholders or their managers to better understand the reasoning for push back and determine if this is something that a risk needs to be captured for.
- Look for grey areas. At times, the stakeholders and/or project leadership can ask for requirements or functionality that was never originally captured when the requirements were finalized. Here, it’s important to understand the gist of these requirements to determine if they are falling within the current scope of work or something extra that the stakeholders want added and did not provide details during the Requirements phase.
- Meet with your peer/key stakeholders regularly. This is a key step that all good project managers should take. It is very important to develop strong and trustworthy relationships with key stakeholders and peer stakeholders who you interact regularly with. If its meeting once or three times per week, its important to check in with these people to capture their perspective on how things in the project are going. As you develop a rapport with these key stakeholders, they will share potential risks or concerns that they see in the project and will come to you for support. It will be important for you to understand their concerns from a holistic standpoint and see how you can work with the project team to address and solve for these areas.
All of these are very important areas to focus on if you are a first time project manager and are struggling to identify potential risks that may impact your project. Of course, this list is not all-inclusive. These are good starting points to consider when trying to identify potential risks to a project. Most importantly, communication among the project team and stakeholders is the key here. Unless you speak to these people, it will be hard to understand, capture and mitigate potential risks before they can become major issues.
Hope you found this post insightful on identifying and managing project risks! What are the steps that you take to identify and mitigate project risks? Please provide your thoughts in the comments below! We love to hear from you!