Risk management culture

Most well run organisations will have risk managed at four distinct levels which are; Corporate/Strategic, Programme, Project and Operational. To do this effectively, a framework for managing risk needs to be designed and implemented to address the following:

Sitting on Risk

An old colleague popped up on Skype yesterday and asked me if I had a Risk Plan he could use. If you’ve approached your project or programme well, you’ll have a Risk Plan/Strategy document. If you don’t, then why not? My old colleague was ‘attending to the missing Risk Plan’, but in reality, he was merely out to get a tick in the box in his project schedule.

Risk management tools

A former colleague asked me about Risk Management tools last night, hence this post.

Most of us have used the old faithful Excel spreadsheet and MS Word templates to manage risk. When the project is small and risks are minimal, that might be a sufficient approach. But what if the project is expensive, high profile or destined to be home to an extensive catalogue of risks?

Risk – it’s not rocket science

I read an interesting article about risk and opportunity in the aerospace industry this morning. Whilst PMBOK considers risk as both negative and positive, the folk in aerospace consider risk as negative and opportunity as positive. Good risk management is not about fear of failure, but removing barriers to success. After all, project and programme management is success oriented, focused on producing products and services for customers. When the success orientation is combined with risk management, opportunity management emerges, which is the identification of opportunities to help attain project goals, and the identification and implementation of actions to capture those opportunities. Below are the keys to success taken from a Space Risk Management Symposium. Whilst their view on risk is slightly different from PMBOK’s, the points are not rocket science and can help most managers running IT projects and programmes.

• Sound risk and opportunity management cannot save a poorly planned program with bad processes
• Prevent the competition between risks and opportunities
• Prevent unhealthy competition between teams
• Risk and opportunity management provide diminishing returns if overused
• The costs of pursuing opportunities and managing risks must be weighed against the expected benefits
• An environment should be created to encourage risk and opportunity management
• Risks and opportunities are not just normal variations in plan
• Recognise the difference between risks and opportunities
• Opportunities are not “positive risks”.