Summary

Your project can be a risk to your business both during and after implementation!

These business risks are not able to be eliminated or reduced as they are the result of planned project outcomes (even if these impacts are not recognized). So, they need to be identified, assessed and managed.

These risks can threaten your business, its customers, suppliers, partners, operations and other projects and initiatives. They can threaten your organization’s ability to be successful both during and after the project’s completion.

When we see projects that have failed to assess their business impact risks we see

1. customers in uproar because their concerns have not been adequately considered
2. suppliers refusing to supply as the changes were not notified to them in time
3. staff complaining that the ‘things that make things work’ have been ignored and the resultant solution is worse than before, and so on.

Importantly, this business risk assessment focuses the project (and governance) team on key dimensions outside of the immediate project — the business, its customers, partners, suppliers and concurrent initiatives, for example. This is the VDM difference.

Knowing your project’s business risks’ impacts you can plan to manage their implications and avoid the associated risks to your business.

To make identification, assessment and management of these critical risks easy we’ve developed our “How to manage your project’s business risks” Guide that covers 28 key business risks so you can generate a common business risks profile.

If your project’s Business Risks are too high at the outset you either have to change your project to reduce them or cull the project before it does real damage to your business.

Also, if you take on too many ‘high business impact’ projects simultaneously this may be more than your organization can tolerate.

Our “How to manage your project’s business risks” Guide takes you through the systemic business risks categorisation and management planning process, providing four risk level options for each risk. By selecting the risk level option that best fits your project you are able to generate both a risk management plan and a Business Risk Profile for your project that differentiates between the levels of internal and external risk.

We provide our standard ‘outcomes-driven’ planning approach whereby, for each risk requiring action, a desired end state is defined and then plans put in place to move from the current to this future state. This simple, common planning approach enables anyone to manage a business risk

Who should read

Our “How to manage your project’s business risks” Guide provides knowledge and support for the

1. Project team,
2. PMO and
3. Governance team

so that you all know what to do and what to expect others to do.

This approach also removes the onus of risk management from being wholly on the project team — the PMO and governance teams also now know they have an active role.

Contents

1. Understanding your project’s business risk profile
2. How to manage your business risks
3. The end-to-end business risk management process
4. How to assess your project’s business risks
5. How to facilitate a business risks assessment workshop
6. How to compute your project’s business risk profile
7. How to analyse you project’s business risk profile
8. How to govern your business risk profile
9. Hot manage the portfolio’s business risks profiles
10. How to plan your risk management approach
11. How to generate a risk management action plan
12. How to manage your business risks
13. How to report business risks
14. How to govern business risks
15. How to conduct a post-project risk management review.

This Guide is supported by a comprehensive Business Risks Assessment Workshop Guide that spells out each of the risks and the four risk level options.

Bonus

Business Risks Assessment Workshop Guide
Comprehensive workshop guide for project participants to jointly assess and score the 28 systemic business impact risks against the standard risk levels provided.

Enables their scores to be captured as well as their suggested implications management approaches as input to the risk management plan.

Worthwhile projects
A value delivery management article by Jed Simms that describes the essential characteristics of successful workshops