The pressure is on for most organisations to speed up delivery and achieve results in a shorter timeframe, focusing project professionals on the tasks and tackling deliverables. However, running faster can increase risk and one of the keys to mitigating that risk is understanding how to buy time.
If you think back to your first car, there’s a decent chance it was an old beater that didn’t cost a lot, lacked quite a few of the luxuries we now take for granted, and it generally got you from A to B. There’s probably a time or two when it conked out and left you out of action while the mechanic took care of the repairs, and you had to grapple with the inconvenience of everything suddenly being harder, longer to achieve, and a great deal more frustrating.
The thing is, there were probably some warning signs: the weird knocking sound, the squawking sound of a fan belt, or that red dashboard light telling you something’s amiss with the oil or water. The seasoned driver might consider those warnings worth getting the car to the mechanic sooner rather than later to assess the problem or know their car well enough to gauge whether it’s really likely to cause any serious damage. The less experienced car owner might not realise that they are about to snap a fan belt and do serious damage as the engine overheats.
The warning lights on the dashboard or the strange sounds are, in essence, risk indicators. They are useful because they give you advance warning that the car needs attention and give the owner time to act before the car gives up the ghost and is rendered undrivable.
Just like a clunky old beater, projects experience unexpected challenges from time to time, and it’s hard to move fast when things aren’t working the way you expect them to.
And just as a quick oil change or some preventative maintenance might keep a car on the road until proper repairs can be done, project leaders have similar formal and informal indicators to work out whether they can continue their projects with planned risk mitigation strategies or whether they actually need to buy some time to effect a course correction.
Risk management is critical and experience matters
Proactively managing risk in projects is crucial in successful delivery for several reasons.
When project teams are constantly surprised by issues, outages, mistakes, and failures, they struggle with progress and the ability to move quickly. If fast-tracking benefits is a priority, then so is managing risk. The ability to move fast requires focusing on what’s down the road to avoid obstacles and ensure the smooth working order of the project’s machinery.
Critical projects require experienced project managers if they are high-risk and fast-moving. Consider the old car: if the owner is a mechanic – or has tooled enough with cars to know them well – you can lay bets that they would be able to identify a slight engine noise that others may not and address the problem or mitigate it enough until they could fix it properly.
While not every car owner needs to be a mechanic, high-risk and important journeys mean that a driver does need to have a solid understanding of what could go wrong and how to address the risk.
Why is risk management often deprioritised?
Risk management is often deprioritised in low-maturity project environments where the focus is task assignment, tracking and project management processes like risk management are not valued or are deemed burdensome or unnecessary. While risks might be identified at a high level at the start of a project, keeping those risks in line of sight as the project progresses is not constant or routine.
Another reason risk management might be deprioritised is that the focus is on meeting tight deadlines and delivering under pressure, shifting focus away from looking ahead to what’s right in front of the team. This is natural and there are times when it’s right to focus project management on ‘right now’. It’s just important not to take eyes off the road for too long.
Is risk management important in Agile projects?
The short answer: yes. There are some important considerations to make in Agile projects, as they are typically structured into two-week sprints and when there’s an issue, it’s raised as a blocker. When managing the backlog and planning sprints, the scrum master and product owner should be identifying risks and sprint planning around those risk to reduce the likelihood of blockers impeding progress and slowing the velocity of the project.
If each sprint is a journey between A and B, done repeatedly to deliver an item of scope, is the reliability and maintenance of a good working process important? Yes, if it breaks down mid-sprint, there is an impact, for example, if that critical resource is unavailable for an extended period, the project will move slower than planned and miss targets.
An agile approach to project delivery is often used to break down a project in such a way as to deliver faster, in increments, and to progress work without prolonged planning stages. While extended planning stages can be expensive and time-consuming, both provide the project team ample opportunity to identify risks and move around them if they arise.
The Agile approach allows teams to learn quickly through doing and by taking a risk-based approach, enabling the team to accelerate delivery, identify and plan future sprints, and navigate risks effectively rather than finding the team constantly blocked because of a lack of foresight.
Managing risk is buying time
Proactive risk management allows project teams to buy time in high-stakes, fast-tracked projects where the opportunity for problems to arise is typically higher, which should inform an organisation about the importance of having an experienced hand at the wheel and a driver who has the understanding of what risks are likely to occur, where, and how much impact they may have.
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