Oct 17, 2006
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Hiro’s Secret to Risk Management
So many things have to go right for projects to be delivered, its amazing that projects get done at all. Not to even speak of the near miracle status of an on-time or on-budget delivery.
No less a Hero than Hiro Nakamura from Yamagato Industries has to travel through time and space to make sure things go right on his project.
Most project managers don’t have this ability. Instead, a project manager has to rely on a unique combination of people skills, experience, communication and patience.
Even with perfect knowledge of what’s going to happen, Hiro Nakamura still needs to exercise hands-on control of critical project variables. He understands risks and manages them while the project is live and ongoing, during the control phase of project management.
This is a poorly publicized secret in project management.
Risks Can’t Be Planned Away
Risk assessment and risk management are often lumped into the planning phase of a project. The idea being that once identified, the risks can be planned away.
The secret is, though, that risks can never be planned away.
Identifying risks during project planning should give a manager an edge is seeing risks before they become too big or expensive to do anything about. But the success of managing those risks takes place while the project is live.
And that means that real-time information is risk management’s best friend.
Information is Control
A project manager’s control on a project depends on what they know and how they affect the variables on a project. This means that information, visibility and control are fundamental to managing projects of all kinds, including marketing projects and IT projects.
There are a lot of project management solutions people use to manage projects. These range from specific project management applications like MS Project to Microsoft Office solutions like MS Excel spreadsheets or CRM solutions like Goldmine, Salesforce.com or ACT!, rigged-up to do some project management functionality. (Some people also try to turn their accounting software, like QuickBooks, into project management software.) These software tools might be good for project planning and for a project manager or PMO (project management office) to track how different reality is from their pre-conceived project plan.
They may also help managers think through projects or schedules.
But they aren’t very good for helping manage risks while a project is live since they don’t provide real-time project information. They give very little to no visibility or control of a project’s critical variables.
Projects Need to be Controlled
And without visibility and control, a project manager is flying blind, their projects easy prey to the smallest of risks.
A dangerous situation -just ask Hiro, he’ll tell you the risks we all face…
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