Early Diagnosis - Easy Solution… Late Diagnosis - Painful Solution
in order to prevent a troubled project and even more when we are already experiencing
issues we must always encourage our team to see not only the project surface but to the
details and to identify all the possible risks …and of course perform good risks
prioritization and good mitigation / prevention plans.
Risks Identification:
The best way to encourage risks identification is facilitating brainstorming sessions, usually
at the begining of the project, a brainstorm session is valuable when conducted accordingly. On brainstorming, the #1 ground rule is DO NOT CRITICIZE, everyone must feel free
enough to say whatever she/he is thinking. A very well mixed audience is also important,
participants from several areas like engineering, finance, sales, taxes, HR, etc will be
very helpful to identify risks that probably are not easy to find at the first sight.
Again, a HARC - Hazard Identification and Risk Control - procedure will help a lot,
specially if your project is being done in industrial environments.
A good way to facilitate risks identification during the whole project life cycle is to
implement a system for on-line risks identification and documentation, several tools
exist for this purpose and will help you a lot to keep your risk register, action plans
and follow up activities under control.
Risk Response Plans:
The mitigation / prevention plans must be very well defined and documented, setting
a responsible person for each plan is key to have all the possible problems under control.
Perform ”What if” sessions with your team will help you to refine your response plans
to be ready when something undesirable occurs.
Remember, try to identify what is not OK soon in your project…don’t wait to act…
if you see something strange or dangerous you MUST do something NOW!
JD
