“Why would we discuss that, it will never happen? I have more important things to do now, that are actually happening…”
This was the phrase I heard in a meeting I created to start the risk management process. We were supporting a growing company to implement their Project Management Framework and PMO.
We have gone through all Project Management Knowledge Areas, and understood which good practices were fit to their size and culture. We knew at that time they were not mature enough in project management at that time to embrace all desired tools and techniques, and their business model also wouldn’t allow them to do so.
One of the biggest challenges we faced was around Risk Management. This is a tricky area, because on one hand it is easy to understand that something will go wrong, no matter how hard you try to avoid it. On the other hand, it is hard to turn that abstract concept into tangible issues and action plans.
We really looked at Risk Management with care. We created templates to help with risk identification, response plans and even contingency plans, and risk management meetings that were supposed to take place weekly, and they did for a while. After some weeks, we realized that these meetings were getting empty because there were no more risks to be identified, they said, and the evolution of those identified earlier was very uncertain.
Even though we were not the project execution team, we attended some of their meetings as support. On doing that we realized something remarkably interesting. They were discussing risks at their weekly status meetings. The real problem here was they were discussing risks, but not treating them as such.
After this finding, we suggested adding risk as a mandatory subject in the agenda of the execution status meetings. This way, risk tools, such as the risk identification sheet, or the risk response forms were brought as an asset to the meetings.
This approach streamlined their process, as there was no longer the need to transfer the notes from the minutes to another document. They were now bringing the appropriate template to help them make the right questions around the issues, or risks, they were foreseeing.
In the end, those intangible ideas were related to what was happening in the project. The perspective change helped them answer that question they asked in the beginning: “Why should we spend time on something that may not even happen?” because now they could correlate that to the real world.