Four Simple Practices to Strengthen Your Risk Management Skills
Improve the chances of a successful project with these practices in risk management.
Risk management is a key practice for project managers and for project teams. Risks can derail a project or a delivery of a feature easily. It’s something that team members need to keep on top of regardless of whether you’re running Agile or Waterfall or whatever methodology.
A risk is an event that can derail your project. It can impact the cost, schedule, and quality of the product or services that the team is creating.
There are four key practices that will help improve your risk management capability and improve the chances of minimizing the risk.
Create and update
Your team needs a risk register. Whether it’s an Excel spreadsheet or a Kanban board on JIRA, it doesn’t matter. The risks register captures, tracks, and help in the management of risks. I recommend having a register that tracks Risks, Assumptions, Issues, and Dependencies. As these four things can end up derailing a project and may move from one type to the next.
For example, a risk may be triggered and become an issue or an assumption that has been invalidated becomes an issue.
An anti-pattern that occurs regularly, is that a risk register is created and then forgotten. It gathers dust in a corner of the project repository.
The risk register needs to be reviewed and updated regularly by the team, not just the project manager. New risks may emerge, risks get triggered and existing risks mitigated and can be closed.
Who is the owner
The project manager or scrum master may not be the best person to own the risk and manage it. It’s important that a risk owner is identified who can help manage it.
If there are no owners, no one is working to resolve that risk.
For example, there is a risk of an API being developed that may not perform as expected. The risk owner would be the technical lead or solution architect as they are the best-placed person to mitigate that risk.
Candidates for risk ownership are usually a member of the team or a stakeholder working on the project or with the delivery team. The owner would need the authority and domain knowledge to manage that risk.
Talk about it regularly
Keep risks front of mind. Have a regular forum to review existing risks and identify and assess new ones. Risk identification isn’t done once at the beginning of the project and that’s it.
It’s done regularly. It might form part of daily stand up in an agile project. Or a weekly risk meeting for more traditional projects. Project team members and risk owners need to be there.
Be proactive about it
Make actions on risks as part of your day to day. Have the actions as tasks on stand up board or part of the team’s and your to do lists. Even if risks are being monitored, make a note that an update was sought on the risk and no change in the register. This builds transparency and accountability.
Don’t Take it lightly
Be on top of it and take ownership of it. People can see risk management as just another project management administrative process that doesn’t add value. But it’s an integral part of delivering a successful project.
Put in place these four practices and you will have your team on the front when it comes to risk management.
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