Risk Management allows organizations to improve the quality of project management practices and governance from the decision to invest to final delivery of project outcomes. Risk management promotes dialog between all stakeholders and sponsors and supports realistic approaches, plans, and project estimates. When implementing or improving Risk Management, you need to consider the organization’s/project’s risk management maturity, processes, methodologies, organization, culture, technologies and oversight structures.
Typical Risk Management Challenges
You are surprised by increases in cost and schedule of your projects due to problems that “should” have been foreseen.
- Project managers are missing “surprise” impactful conditions and events that are causing them to have to come to you and the customer to request more time or money or adjust the targets of the project; i.e. they missed risks that could/should have been seen
- Your customers become angry and mistrustful because they are being surprised by the unforeseen events that they say you and your team should have anticipated
- Your project managers are reluctant to surface risk conditions and events – fearful that they will be punished for bringing bad news to the table
- Your projects suffer from moral issues because of these unseen risks and the lack of a process to identify, capture and plan how to adjust the project plan accordingly.
If you are experiencing these problems, then your risk management processes, tools and systems are likely not up to the task of being useful and helpful. Clients we work with on these problems come to recognize that:
- Risk management is more than “issues tracking”
- Risk management is a key project management process and must be integrated into the planning and execution of the project.
- Risk management, like project management can be continuously improved to bring substantial benefits to the organization and the customer, but it takes management commitment to make it happen and to instill it in projects so that all may benefit from it.
Clients who address risk management as an integral way of doing business see gains in these areas:
- Improved investment decision making and project selection
- Better cost, schedule, and performance estimates
- Improved customer relations and reputation
- Improve team communications and morale
Benefits of Risk Management Done Well
- When done right, risk management provides significant benefits including:
- Senior leadership has better quality and more meaningful engagement with project teams and stakeholders – including the customer
- Substantially improves communications between all project stakeholders; including sponsors, customers, project manager, team members, subcontractors and the public.
- Creates useful information in the form of contingency budgets for cost and schedule
- Generates insights concerning where projects need attention
- Provides a foundation for examining and understanding the health and performance of the project
- Suppliers and subcontractors are more cooperative and proactive to address issues and challenges
- Anticipates what could happen to impact project performance and to engage key stakeholders in critical conversations about the project
Who Benefits from Risk Management Done Well
Our consultants at T.I.S have decades of experience in helping organizations and project teams improve risk planning and management. We design “right sized” risk processes for our clients that deliver results tailored to the needs of the project/program. We know from long experience that “one size does not fit all” when it comes to implementing these critical processes, tools, and systems. Therefore we work with our clients to help them “get it right”.
We know that the impact of not “right sizing” risk management is poor user and organizational adoption and unrealized benefits. Impacts poor risk management can range from overrun budgets, missed end dates, customer dissatisfaction, outright project failure and impacts to reputation.
Therefore, we focus on pragmatic risk management solutions that allow management to have more confidence in their project data and reports while reducing project risk while aiming to help you gain the most from these efforts.
Whether you are interested in implementing some of the elements of Risk Management to augment your existing capabilities or are attempting to implement Risk Management for the first time, we can help. Our consultants have helped clients implement Risk Management, risk oversight frameworks, improve risk management planning and control techniques, and select and implement risk management tool suites.