5 Risk Management Mistakes To Avoid

5 Risk Management Mistakes To Avoid

August 13, 2014

I’ve been mentoring a junior project manager and we were reviewing the risks on his project last week. We went through all the risks on the log and we talked about good practice and what he should be actively doing to manage the risks. Then he asked me a question. “What mistakes should I be looking out for?” he said. I thought this was a great question. Too often we focus on what we should be doing and forget about what we should avoid doing! That’s when mistakes creep in as we haven’t been focused on stopping them from happening. So here is my list of 5 mistakes to avoid when you are carrying out risk management on your project, which I shared with my colleague.

Mistake 1: No Risk Owner

Your notes in your risk management software should always include who is responsible for owning the risk. That means writing down the name of the person who will ensure that the risk management tasks are carried out. That individual doesn’t have to do all the work themselves, but they should coordinate the people who are actually doing the work and make sure that the risk log is updated with progress and that you get status reports as required.

Don’t be tempted to record your own name as the risk owner for every risk. Many risk management plans would be better off led by a subject matter expert and this can also be a useful development exercise for a more junior member of the team who wants to take responsibility for a small, manageable piece of work.

Mistake 2: No Action Plan

Each risk should have a documented action plan. This sets out exactly what is going to be done to prevent the risk from happening. Sometimes, of course, you will be taking no action and are prepared to accept the risk without doing anything about it. If this is the case, make sure that you record in your risk log that you have considered what actions are required and have actively decided to do nothing. And sometimes it will be a positive risk and you’ll want it to happen!

Whatever the approach you want to take, it should be documented so that you know exactly what is going to be done and can track progress against it. Remember to go back to your action plans regularly and update them with what actions have been completed and what new tasks have been identified.

Mistake 3: No Risk Analysis

When you’ve got a lot of risks it can be tempting to skip the analysis phase and not spend time working out which area of the project it will impact or how serious the problem will be if it happens. You shouldn’t do this – it isn’t appropriate to treat every risk in the same way and you’ll only know how much time and effort to invest in addressing it if you properly carry out some analysis to assess the impact and likelihood of each of the risks.

Review each risk and establish how likely it is to happen, and what impact it will have on the rest of the project if it does happen. Get the whole team involved as they will probably identify other impacts and have some useful information to feed into the analysis exercise. This will enable you to focus your risk management budget in the right places by targeting the most serious risks first.

Mistake 4: No Timescales

When do you need the risk resolved by? Or when will it stop being a problem if nothing happens? Risks don’t last forever, so you should also be recording a timescale for the risk in your log.

For example, if there is a risk of bad weather delaying the delivery of some equipment to your building site, then this will pass on a particular day – the day that the equipment is due to be delivered. If you don’t note down this date in your log and then update the risk entry once the date has passed you could be including the mitigation plans or reporting on this risk for far longer than you really need to. Also make sure that any actions related to your risk management plans have dates against them.

You’ll want to monitor that they are being dealt with in a timely manner so you can be sure that enough appropriate action has been taken in time to offset any impact should the risk occur. Otherwise you may be working on actions and find that you are too late!

Mistake 5: No Risk Priority

Use your risk analysis and timescale information to give each risk a priority. Those that are likely to have an impact quickly are obviously more important to deal with than those that may not cause any problems until next year. Those risks that will have a huge impact are more important than those that won’t cause many issues.

Each risk should be given a priority and then you can tailor your work plans to ensure that the important ones are dealt with first. You can also use risk priorities for reporting purposes as generally stakeholders will only be interested in knowing more about the high priority risks. You won’t bombard them with information about all risks if you can tailor your reports to only give them the most important data about the highest priority problems that the project is facing. “Thanks for these pointers,” my colleague said. He had made lots of notes and went away from our mentoring session feeling a bit more confident about handling risk management on his project (or at least, I hope he did).

What other mistakes have you encountered when it comes to managing risk? Let us know in the comments below if you are prepared to share your experiences! Monitor your risks with the powerful tracking features of ProjectManager.com. It will give you confidence that actions are being completed and risks are being managed professionally by all your team members. 

 

Avoid These 5 Meeting Mistakes

Avoid These 5 Meeting Mistakes

August 11, 2014

Yesterday I had meetings all day. And I mean all day. It wasn’t supposed to be like that, but because some took longer than planned one ran into the other and I found myself rushing between meeting rooms trying to catch up some time, which of course I couldn’t.

The disadvantage of having meetings all day, I’ve found, is that you don’t actually have any time to do any real work! You take away a list of actions from each meeting but you can’t fit in managing to do any of them because you are so busy attending the next meeting and picking up yet more actions to do at some point in the future when you aren’t in another meeting!

Poorly run meetings are the most common cause of this kind of meeting overload and the stress it causes, and that was certainly the case for me yesterday. I saw all 5 of these meeting mistakes on the same day – which ones are you guilty of?

1. Poor Technology

If you are using collaboration software then make sure you know how it works! It wastes a lot of time for your attendees if you have to use the first 15 minutes of the meeting making sure that everyone has audio and can see the right screens, or that they have copies of the presentation materials.

Upload documentation to an online document storage system before the meeting starts and if you are worried about people in other buildings not being able to access the meeting then do a technical run through with them in advance. It will only take 5 minutes and it will give them the confidence they need to join the meeting on time on the day.

2. No Agenda

What are you talking about in this meeting? Several of my meetings yesterday didn’t have agendas. I arrived and I wasn’t sure why I was there or what the purpose was, but because they had sounded important I had decided I needed to be in the room. Big mistake!

Not having an agenda means that your attendees can’t plan properly so they don’t know what subjects to read up on or what status updates to bring along. This means that you can rarely make decisions in the meeting as people don’t have the right information and you have to meet again. What a waste of time!

3. Starting Late

“Let’s just wait for So-and-so,” is something I never like to hear at the beginning of the meeting. For a start, So-and-so should have had the courtesy to turn up on time like everyone else. And the meeting organizer should be respectful of everyone else’s time and not delay the meeting kick off.

Having said that, it’s polite to wait a minute or so, or maybe longer if everyone agrees and you definitely know that the missing person is on their way. People do get caught up in traffic or drop their papers on the way to the meeting room and they may be a little late. But I would suggest starting if you’ve waited 5 minutes and there’s no sign that the missing person is going to show at all.

 4. Inviting The Wrong Attendees

In one of my meetings we were discussing the marketing plans for a new product. The project team had lots of great ideas. But there was one flaw – there was no one from the Marketing department in the room. Surely someone should have invited them? After all, they are the marketing experts and would be doing most of the work.

As a result, while we brainstormed some good ideas we couldn’t make any final decisions or draw up an action plan because the wrong people were in the room. The project manager had to take away an action to follow up with the Marketing team representative and then report back via email. We decided this would be better in the first instance than calling yet another meeting with everyone plus Marketing to go through it all again. But it would have been even better if the project manager had got the right people there to begin with.

5. Inappropriate Location

My final meeting of the day was at a building I hadn’t been to before, and the project manager who had arranged it had not sent any directions. So I had to ring up, find out where it was, make my travel plans (luckily it wasn’t far) and then work out how long it would take to get there. Everyone else who hadn’t been to that venue before had to do the same thing. All that time could have been saved if the project manager, who knew the location well, had simply sent a couple of lines of instructions about how to get there and where to park.

When I did arrive, I had to pull a chair from another meeting room and perch at the corner of a desk. The room was way too small for everyone who had been invited. All in all, the location of the meeting was not appropriate for what we were trying to do, and the lack of directions just made me feel worse about the whole thing.

That would have been so easy to get right – choose a venue that is suitable for the meeting. If you need a projector, make sure there is a big blank wall or a screen. If you need flip charts, get them in the room with enough space to write on them and for people to move around. And send out directions if you need to!

Meetings are one of the top tools that project managers use to keep the project moving along. They are great for letting everyone know the current project status and to make decisions about what needs to happen next. But run badly, meetings can kill productivity and really demotivate the people who are attending. Fixing these 5 problems is one way to make your meetings better. What else can you do? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Professional online project management software can help you plan and carry out your meetings effectively. ProjectManager.com will let you share your agenda and meeting instructions, collaborate virtually with colleagues and record your project progress.