Project Planning
Read this chapter, which discusses the planning phase of the project lifecycle. What are some of the pain points in this part of the project management process? What tools do project management professionals typically use to plan projects?
Risk management planning
Even the most carefully planned project can run into trouble. No matter
how well you plan, your project can always run into unexpected problems.
Team members get sick or quit, resources that you were depending on turn
out to be unavailable, even the weather can throw you for a loop. For
example, Hurricane Ike. So does that mean that you're helpless against
unknown problems? No! You can use risk planning to identify potential
problems that could cause trouble for your project, analyze how likely
they' Il be to occur, take action to prevent the risks you can avoid, and
minimize the ones that you can't.
A risk is any uncertain event or condition that might affect your project. Not
all risks are negative. Some events (like finding an easier way to do an
activity) or conditions (like lower prices for certain materials) can help your
project. When this happens, we call it an opportunity; but it's still handled
just like a risk.
There are no guarantees on any project. Even the simplest activity can turn
into unexpected problems. Any time there's anything that might occur on
your project and change the outcome of a project activity, we call that a
risk. A risk can be an event (like a hurricane) or it can be a condition (like
an important part being unavailable). Either way, it's something that may or
may not happen ...but if it does, then it will force you to change the way
you and your team will work on the project.
If your project requires that you stand on the edge of a cliff, then there's a
risk that you could fall (Figure 22). If it's very windy out or if the ground is
slippery and uneven, then falling is more likely.
Figure 22: Potential ways to handle risk in a project.
When you're planning your project, risks are still uncertain: they haven't
happened yet. But eventually, some of the risks that you plan do happen.
And that's when you have to deal with them. There are four basic ways to
handle a risk.
- Avoid: The best thing that you can do with a risk is to avoid it. If you
can prevent it from happening, it definitely won't hurt your project.
The easiest way to avoid this risk is to walk away from the cliff
(Figure 22), but that may not be an option on this project.
- Mitigate: If you can't avoid the risk, you can mitigate it. This means
taking some sort of action that will cause it to do as little damage to
your project as possible (Figure 22).
- Transfer: One effective way to deal with a risk is to pay someone else
to accept it for you (Figure 22). The most common way to do this is to buy
insurance.
- Accept: When you can't avoid, mitigate, or transfer a risk, then you
have to accept it (Figure 22). But even when you accept a risk, at least
you've looked at the alternatives and you know what will happen of it
occurs. If you can't avoid the risk, and there's nothing you can do to
reduce its impact, then accepting it is your only choice.
By the time a risk actually occurs on your project, it's too late to do
anything about it. That's why you need to plan for risks from the beginning
and keep coming back to do more planning throughout the project.
The risk management plan tells you how you're going to handle risk in your
project. It documents how you' ll access risk on the project, who is
responsible for doing it, and how often you'll do risk planning (since you'll
have to meet about risk planning with your team throughout the project).
The plan has parts that are really useful for managing risks.
- Risk categories that you'll use to classify your risks. Some risks are
technical, like a component that might turn out to be difficult to use.
Others are external, like changes in the market or even problems with
the weather.
- Risk breakdown structure (RBS) is a great tool for managing your
risk categories. It looks like a WBS, except instead of tasks it shows
how the risks break down into categories.