Publish the Plan

A well thought through project plan is a great tool for both planning your project work, and also for tracking your project work. It can help you to identify all the steps that need to happen to get you to the end of your project. As you work through the tasks the plan also lets you know if you are on track, or falling behind.

The plan can act as a roadmap for everyone who is working on your project, including yourself. But it can only act as a roadmap if it is available. If don’t publish your plan for others to see then you are not using the power of the plan to communicate to your team what the project is about. Think about what the plan holds: tasks, who is completing each task, how long the task should take, what is dependent on the task…A wealth of information that can make your role as a project manager much easier.

What do I mean by publish? Just making it visible. Print it out and stick it on a wall, somewhere where your team can see it and refer to it. You could email a soft copy to team members who work remotely.

Try publishing in different ways. For example you could post the schedule gantt chart view – this has the advantage of all team members seeing not only their own tasks but the tasks of others and the dependencies between them. Team members might also find it useful to get a list of all their tasks – a to do list.

If you’re running a project for yourself, with just you as a team member, you should still make sure that plan is somewhere where you can see it. Stick it on the fridge, or by the cookie jar – use it as a motivational tool for those moments when you might prefer to be doing something other than your project tasks. Put a reminder in your phone or calendar to review the plan regularly.

Reviewing the plan is the first step towards monitoring the success of your project.

Mitigate project risk

Mitigating a risk means to reduce the likelihood or impact of the risk, or to prevent the risk happening.

Working out the mitigation strategies gives you a backup plan that you can use should the risk occur. It means you are ready and don’t have to think through the problem when what you thought was a risk turns out to be a very real issue facing your project.

Let’s say your risk is that someone will call in sick, leave you short of people to run your project, and so delay your delivery. You could mitigate this risk by hiring temps to cover the absence, or maybe by making sure ahead of time that you have others who could step in, and making sure they are trained appropriately. In this example the risk could still occur, but you are more prepared and have options to reduce the impact.

If your risk was that you suspected a key supplier might not deliver vital supplies on time, you might mitigate the risk by working with another supplier. Or using two suppliers, or carrying more supplies in stock, or including penalty clauses in your contact with the vendor. In this case you are reducing the likelihood of the risk occurring.

You can see that there might be many ways of mitigating any one risk. Thinking through mitigation is an opportunity for you to think creatively.
Working out the mitigation can also mean you revise your original assessment of the risk. You might decide that the mitigation steps are sufficient to reduce the likelihood or severity of the risk so much that you are comfortable in reducing the score of the risk, and giving it less attention. Or, you might find few or no mitigation strategies, and so want to raise the score of the risk and keep it on your radar.

When you have identified your project risks you should review your project plan and determine if you want to make any changes. Do you need to add more contingency to any of your tasks? Do you need to add tasks you need to complete as part of your risk mitigation strategy? It might seem that you are making your plan more difficult to complete, but making your plan more realistic is a preferable option to ignoring risk and having it derail your project – that would be more expensive in the long run.

With your plan in place and risks identified you are close to being able to publish your plan.

Project Risk

With a draft plan in place you’re ready to start work – or are you? That draft plan is assuming that things will go to plan, and does not, for example, allow for

• tasks taking longer than anticipated
• new, necessary tasks being discovered,
• problems being encountered which need to be resolved
• supplies not being available on time
• or anything else that might go wrong.

If there is one golden rule of project management, it is that things will go wrong. We do not live in a perfect world – and our projects are run in that imperfect world. Tasks will take longer than anticipated, people will get sick, vendors will deliver late, and things will break. There is always a risk that things will go wrong, and you need to consider these risks.

Identifying risks allows you to think about ways to prevent those risks from happening, or reducing the impact of those risks. In other words, mitigating the risk, which means to reduce the likelihood or severity of the risk.

What does that mean? Let’s think about the first dimension of risk: likelihood. It might be feasible that your new manufacturing machinery might fail, but if you know it is new, it has warranty, and comes from a reliable vendor, then the risk might be identified as low in likelihood. But if you have experience of an unreliable vendor who provides supplies for your new project, you could rightly identify a likely risk of them again failing to deliver on time. Late delivery might mean you fail to meet your schedule.

The second dimension of risk is impact. Using the above example, if your machinery failed that could be a high impact risk – it would bring the whole production line to a halt, while you have workers standing idle, and deadlines not being met. Another example of one of those workers calling in sick one morning will not stop the whole production line, so might be a low impact risk.

Some risks you identify might not be relevant – you need to be realistic. A low-flying aircraft could crash into your factory, destroying it, and preventing you from manufacturing your new product. Although impact would be extremely high, the likelihood of this happening is very low indeed. So low you should not even consider it – it is not relevant to your project.

So, for each risk you identify you need to assign an impact and a likelihood, and you can create a risk matrix where you identify likelihood and impact as being either High, Medium or Low.

For projects that have many risks or where you need help working out which risks to worry about the most you might weight likelihood and impact with a score. For example assigning a value of 3 to High, 2 to Medium and 1 to Low, and multiplying out to get a total score for risk.

The risks with the highest scores are those you need to worry about – they are more likely to happen, and if they do happen they have a higher impact.

Next steps will be to work out how to mitigate the project risk.