Summary

Ultimately, your project is about delivering — delivering the project itself and delivering the associated benefits and value.

There are a number of common, systemic but often overlooked risks associated with both project and benefits delivery. Repeatedly on project health check assignments we have found these basic, critical risks missed completely with consequential detrimental impacts on the project itself. This is so unnecessary.

To ensure they are not overlooked on your project we’ve created this “How to manage your project’s delivery risks” Guide.

However, this is not just a list of ‘common risk types’, we’ve

• identified ‘environmental’ risks separately from the ‘systemic’ risks
• predefined four risk levels so that all projects can score their risks on a common basis
• enabled both current and target risk levels to be scored, allowing progress towards the target risk state to be planned and monitored
• generated a standard ‘delivery risk profile’ that is comparable across projects and can be updated as the project progresses (and enables portfolio risk profile monitoring).

This is the VDM difference. Let me explain why this is so important to your project.

Environmental risks

There are some aspects of a project that can only be mitigated by changing the nature of the project. These “risk drivers” (such as the cost of failure risk) can impact the relative importance and criticality of the other risks.

We therefore have created the concept of “Environmental” risks for these risk-types. These Environmental risks are assessed as part of your risk analysis and used to weight the overall risk profile. For example, a moderate-to-high risk project with a low cost-of-failure risk is a different business proposition to a moderate-to-high risk project with a high cost-of-failure risk.

There are three ‘environmental’ risks each that weight the systemic risk scores for project and benefits delivery risks.

Systemic risks

“Systemic” risks are present in almost every project — the only question is your project’s level of exposure. I have identified 14 key systemic delivery risks that provide a standard basis for determining and communicating your project’s risk profile.

Each Systemic risk has four pre-defined risk levels. To assess your risk level and generate your project’s Delivery Risk Profile you need to select the most appropriate risk levels from the template provided for your risk’s current and target states. This then gives you a ‘current state’ and a ‘target state’ that, in turn, allows you to plan a risk management strategy to get from the current to the target risk level.

This approach also uses one of our key risk management disciplines — the need for planned, measurable ‘end risk states’ whose realization can be tracked and monitored. Every systemic risk can have a target end state that requires an action plan to achieve it. This targeted approach makes risk planning easy and avoids, for example, the common occurrence of risk management strategies, plans and effort that don’t actually address the underlying risk!

Risk profile

The results of the Environmental and Systemic risk scores are computed to generate both a current and target risk profile score for both project and benefits delivery risks. This Delivery Risk Profile allows everyone to compare projects on a standard, objective basis and see the level of project risk that exists at the individual and portfolio management levels.

While many risk approaches will produce a risk score or alike, one key difference with our approach is that it is directly connected to taking action to reduce your risks — ie it is not just a scoring approach but a risk management approach that also includes scoring. This is critical as too many risk-scoring approaches lead the project team to assume that they’ve addressed the risks just because they’ve scored them.

As our Profile is action-oriented, it can be updated quarterly to show how your project’s risk profile is (hopefully) diminishing against plan.

Who should read

Our “How to manage your project delivery 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.

Contents

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

Bonus

Delivery Risks Assessment Workshop Guide
Comprehensive workshop guide for project participants to jointly assess and score the 6 environmental and 14 systemic risks against the standard risk levels provided.Enables their current and target scores to be captured as well as their suggested risk 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