Risk Management is one of those project management areas that get more lip service than practice. There’s a perception that risk management is hard, complicated, takes a lot of time, and is boring.  While some risk management implementations can be all of these things, the risk management you choose to follow on your projects just needs to be “good enough”.

What is Good Enough Risk Management

Let’s invoke the 80/20 rule¹ in our definition. For small to medium IT projects, good enough risk management is simply this:

• Create a log of risks at the beginning of the project
• Rank each risk as follows:
  • Likelihood of it occurring (0 – 99%)
  • Impact on project scope, cost, time or quality if it occurs (0-99%)
• Prioritize the log by severity (likelihood X impact)
• Create mitigation strategies for risk items with greater than 50% severity
• Review the risks with the project team regularly throughout the project

Following this “good enough” risk management approach will put you in the driver’s seat of your project, and will reduce surprises for you on your project.

Note that the most important part of this risk management strategy is the thinking part.  If you rush through the creation of the risk items without really thinking about what you’re doing, you will likely miss some or all of the most important risks.  On the other hand, if you include too many risks, the ones that will “bite you” can hide in all the detail.  Finally, if you do this exercise in isolation from your project team, you will almost certainly miss important items.

Free Risk Management Log Template

Here is a basic risk management log template you can use freely.  If you have others that you would like to make available to other readers at no cost, please contact me.  I’ll add them here.

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Free Project Risk Management Template is a post from: Alec Satin on People, Projects and Process

1. For most things, 20 percent of the effort will provide you with 80 percent of the positive results.

The Delivery Status Grid is provided here to help you in your project communication and reporting.  It was designed by Paul O’Brien, an experienced project manager and the creator of the Promise Keeper.

The following post has been written by Paul O’Brien.

What is it?

The Delivery Matrix for each project lists all the key work products (documents, contracts, test-plans, computer code etc) and has a set of columns showing progress through the life of the object. It covers the initial design meetings, doing the work, reviewing and sign off phases. I put the rough % completion status in for every object. Again its all brightly colour coded by conditional formatting to give an at-a-glance overview of everything. I add colourful speach-bubble notes and big red circles etc to highlight problems.

I used to drive things with this tool but it’s too crude. Now I just keep it as a communication tool and rely exclusively on AutoFocus and the Promise Keeper.

Why use it?

The clients love it for 3 reasons.
1. It looks official and shows we have a cunning plan
2. It motivates people to push for completion and show progress
3. It makes it easy for senior execs to tell what’s happening (they can’t read gantt charts)

How to use it?

I update it using a projector during my weekly project meetings – so everyone can see and debate what progress we are recording (or lack thereof).

These are quirky little tools I have created just for myself. I only explain them here because several people asked.

Respectfully,
Paul

Next Steps

The Delivery Status Grid may be easily duplicated using any spreadsheet program.  If you decide to create one to use on one or more of your projects (highly recommended), please consider offering your version as a template for others to use.  If you send it to me, I’ll post it here for others, and will give you credit as well.  Thanks! -Alec

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Free Project Management Tool – Delivery Status Grid is a post from: Alec Satin on People, Projects and Process

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Does PMP certification make a better project manager? When Raven Young asked this question, opinions varied.

Does Microsoft Project, the de facto project management software standard, improve IT project performance? I challenge anyone to show me proof of a strong correlation between how good you are as a project manager, and the cost of the tools that you use.

Some of the best project managers use the simplest tools. Many of us who are efficiency software and tool junkies have come full circle and selectively reincorporated paper-based task systems into our personal workflows.

As part of the primary mission of this blog, I seek to provide you with tools and techniques which can increase your real skill as a project manager.  This post is about Paul O’Brien’s Promise Keeper, a simple tool which can:

1. Improve team communications
2. Facilitate efficient meetings
3. Save you time

You can start using your own Promise Keeper today.   Best of all, it’s free.  The author and creator, Paul O’Brien, has given permission for you to use or modify it as you see fit.¹  If you decide to try it, please leave a quick comment below.  Paul will be monitoring the list, and would be glad to hear your thoughts.

What is the Promise Keeper (by Paul O’Brien)

Several people asked about the Promise Keeper and the Delivery Matrix²   These are quirky little tools I have created just for myself. I only explain them here because several people asked.  They are not part of any methodology – I just made them up myself to help me do my job.

Project management (or all management now I think of it) is all about setting up an environment where busy people can make good promises and then keep them. A good promise is one where they are motivated to do the task, have not under-estimated it and the promise is made and recorded in ‘public’. If they can’t keep the promise I need to know in time to deal with it. I find the most important thing here is to eliminate all fear and anxiety from the environment – otherwise you get bad promises and poor promise-keeping.

I have a simple spreadsheet list with persons name, date of next review, what the promise is and the final deadline. I sort this by persons name so I can batch by person and remind them of all their promises. I use conditional formatting to highlight the ones that are due for review or completion.

How to Start

The best way to start using your own version of the Promise Keeper to to start a spreadsheet like the example at the top of this post.  Include columns for:

1. Person who made the promise
2. Status (In Progress, To Do, Done)
3. Due Date
4. Next Review Date
5. (Calculated Field) Days to Due Date.  Negative if due date has been missed.

Start with the current items you are tracking.  If this seems onerous to you, an alternative way to begin is to bring an empty sheet to your next team meeting.  You can then fill it in with your team.

In future team meetings or status updates, this promise keeper can be one of the main exhibits updated and used as a basis for the agenda.

I have started using a promise keeper myself, and am impressed with its elegance and clarity.

Thanks Paul, for your generosity in sharing.  Paul’s delivery matrix will be presented for you use in a future post.

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Free newsletter and eBook by email. Why subscribe?

Free Project Management Tool – The Promise Keeper is a post from: Alec Satin on People, Projects and Process

1. Please do not publish it elsewhere without his express written permission.  Thanks!
2. Will be presented later this week in a follow up post.