Summary

Every project has risks that are specific to that project (as opposed to the common, systemic risks covered in our “How to manage your project’s delivery risks” and “How to manage your project’s business risks” Guides.)

The challenge is to identify all of the most relevant and threatening risks and take the necessary action to reduce the threat to your project. Simple, eh?

Particularly if you have a list of potential risks to hand that you can pick from. Even simpler??

Well actually, these lists can make things worse. While they are useful as a final crosscheck to ensure there is no topic you’ve overlooked, you need to start with your knowledge of your own project. Otherwise, you’ll end up with numerous risks that don’t really relate to your project but are included ‘just in case’ and because ‘they sound like they may be relevant’.

One aspect to always remember is that any time, effort and money spent on identifying, classifying and addressing risks is potentially wasted as these risks may never occur.

So, how you manage risks is a key productivity factor that can increase or decrease your project’s value.

On the one hand you want to ensure your project is not at risk while, on the other hand, spending as little time as possible on managing risks. This is the focus of our “How to manage your project-specific risks” Guide.

The Guide takes you through the process of identifying, classifying and planning your risk management strategies so as to maximize your protection while minimizing your workload.

Some risks require no action. Some risks require only some contingency planning with no further action at this time.

Others need to be addressed and managed down to an acceptable level. You need to know which is which, why and how to monitor them to prevent new risks or changes in the risks’ profiles catching you unawares. This not complex, its just a process that we provide.

We also bring some important basics to bear, such as

1. All risks must be stated as risks. This may sound obvious, but many risks are stated so that you don’t know what the risk is at all. When you adopt the simple convention of using a standard risk statement format, such as, “There is a risk that …” immediately the real risk becomes apparent to all.
2. All risks should have a desired end state - where you’d like to be. Too often risk management plans aim to take action without any definition of what the target end point is or how the risk mitigation activity will be measured as a success. With a starting point (your risk analysis) and end point defined, your can generate standard ‘change plans’ to manage the risks that are easily understood, used and tracked.

Project risk management is about both managing threats and productivity. That’s the VDM difference.

Your “How to manage your project-specific risks” Guide enables you to work with your project and governance teams to quickly develop a value-based cost and risk-effective approach to risk management,

1. reducing your project’s risk management workload
2. reducing your project’s likelihood of failing
3. culling ‘cannot deliver’ projects at the outset, and
4. aligning all levels of management to increase risk management effectiveness and ensure a consistent approach at all levels

You can focus on project-specific risks alone or combine this Guide with the systemic risks Guides (Delivery and Business risks) and develop a holistic approach to risk management that also generates common, comparable and measurable risk profiles for your project.

Who should read

“How to mange your project-specific risks” guides you through the 12 steps of the risk management process. It incorporates the risk management roles and responsibilities of 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.

It builds on the knowledge contained in “Understanding Project Risks”.

Contents

1. Understanding the risk management process
2. The end-to-end risk management process
3. How to identify all of your project’s risks
4. How to facilitate a risks identification workshop
5. How to clarify and classify project-specific risks
6. How to determine your risk management strategy
7. How to generate a risk management action plan
8. How to govern your project’s risk management strategy
9. How to track project risks
10. How to manage your project risks
11. How to report risks
12. How to govern your risks
13. How to monitor your risks
14. How to conduct a post-project risk management review

In addition, we also provide you with some additional supporting tools and resources to make use of this Guide easy and effective.

Bonus

Identifying Project Specific Risks Participant Workshop Guide
Designed to support the project-specific risk identification process through equipping the risk identification workshop participants with the risk categorization criteria and risk-capture forms

Worthwhile workshops
A value delivery management article by Jed Simms that describes the essential characteristics of successful workshops (and why so many workshops are ineffective).