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.

Build Your Plan

At last, you get to build your plan. The basic project management tasks we have described so far have helped you to pull together all the things you need for your plan. You have answered the following questions:

• What will my project deliver?
• What tasks do I need to do?
• What groups of tasks are there?
• In what order should I do these tasks?
• How long will each of these tasks take?

Now you can build your plan by putting each task against a calendar. Decide on your start date, put the first task there. Use the duration of the task to work out when it will end, and that will give you the date you’re your second task can start. Chaining your tasks together like this gives you your plan.

Remember that some tasks, or groups of tasks, can be run at the same time as others. For example, one team could be working on landscaping your garden, while another team renovates your house.

A great way to picture your plan is using a Gantt chart. These charts show the tasks, with a representation of these tasks against a calendar. The simple example below shows a plan for a couple of jobs to improve a house: renovating a living room, and landscaping a garden. You can see there is some logic in the ordering of the tasks – before painting there is preparation of surfaces, before that removing furniture to clear space. You can also see the estimate of duration, and how these add together to give the overall duration of the project. The tasks for renovating the living room take eight days. The tasks for the landscaping also take eight days, but are run in parallel to the living room, so these tasks must be done by a different person or team.

 

You can also see in this example that the work will be done during the working week, Monday to Friday. Bear in mind that if your project is a personal project then your available time may be in evenings or at weekends. Your plan needs to reflect this – don’t assume you can put in a 40 hour working week on a home project if you still holding down a day job.

Oh, and don’t worry if you don’t have a fancy-schmancy project management tool to build your plan. Use paper and pen, the back of an old envelope, whiteboard, butcher’s paper and crayons. What the plan looks like doesn’t matter. What matters is having a plan that is realistic, that you can commit to, and that will help you deliver whatever it is you’re working towards.

Have fun putting your plan together, and in the next post we will take a look at the plan to identify key milestones you can aim for along the way.

Arrange your tasks in order

So by now you should have an idea of all the things your project is going to deliver. You should also have a list of the tasks you need to complete to deliver these things. You have also put your tasks into natural groupings. The next basic project management step is to think about the order these tasks will be completed in.

Knowing the order will help to translate your list of tasks from a “To Do” list to a plan. Knowing the order means you know which tasks you will complete first. And then when you have finished that task, which task comes next, and so on. The plan guides you through each task, one by one, until you reach the end of the project. Having this ordered plan makes you efficient. When you have time for your project you don’t need to wonder “What next?” – the plan will tell you this.

So what things might you consider when you put your tasks in order?
Some tasks simply cannot be completed before others are completed. For example, you can’t build the walls on your new house, until you have completed the foundations. You can’t tile until you have prepared the wall. You’ can’t knit a sweater until you have bought the wool.

There may be some tasks that need to be done early because there is a long lead time. If your tiles need to be shipped in from overseas you might complete the task of ordering them early, so they are delivered by the time you are ready to tile.
It may be that you only have the resources to do a task at a particular time. For example, you can borrow your friends van to help you pick up building materials, but it is available one weekend only.

Consider also that not all tasks need to be ordered sequentially, one after the other. You may start some tasks at the same time as others, especially when you have a team of people who can all work on different tasks. You don’t need to wait for your small business to start up before you start working on your business plan.

Ordering your tasks is about putting them in a logical sequence, but also, as you can see from the examples, you may start to think about scheduling them against a calendar. The next step of basic project planning which will really help you to schedule your plan is to estimate the effort required to complete each task.

Basic Project Management

Let’s walk through the key steps of basic project management.

Firstly, let’s assume that you have a project in mind.  But be sure that the piece of work you want to do is a project.  A project is a temporary endeavour that delivers an outcome.  For example, building a house is a project as it has a limited duration, and delivers the outcome of a complete house.  Maintaining that house is not a project because that task will never end.  Let’s hope that your project is also something which is going to help you achieve one of your goals, and is fun too.

Now, think through all the things you need to do to complete that project, and list every task needed to complete your project.  If you are building a house that could be an extensive list, including buying land and materials, obtaining permission, building work, decorating, and landscaping.  Once you have completed all the tasks on your list, you have finished your project. (So, make sure every task is on there!)

Now, this big list of tasks is probably not very structured at this stage, so let’s structure the tasks into a more workable project plan.  

Group similar tasks together.  For example, you might group together all the tasks you need to complete to prepare the building site, or all the tasks involved in laying the building’s foundations.  

Arrange your tasks in order, e.g. you will not be building the roof until you have built walls, and the walls are in turn dependent on the foundations being in place.  There are other reasons for ordering tasks, e.g. when the right people to the job, or the dollars to pay for it become available.

Now, estimate the effort required to complete each task.  How many days or hours will be needed to finish that task?  Think about who can allocate to each task to do the work, and what their level of skill is.  Think about how much time they have available for your project, making sure that you allow for any other work they need to do.

Now you have enough information to build your plan.  Drop all of these items into a calendar.  You need to take into account all dependencies between tasks, when people are available, effort required, and how much time they can devote to your project.

With your plan in place you can identify key milestones.  These are the big targets you will reach during your project, before you reach the end, like the foundations of the house are complete, the walls are up, the roof is on, the decoration and fit-out is finished.  It is easier to aim for a milestone than the end of the whole project.

Ok, that’s the first version of your plan.  What now?

Think about how risky the project is.  What can go wrong?  How likely is this risk?  And if it does go wrong, what will you do to fix it?  This thinking gives your risk plan.  And that will help you to think about how much contingency you need to add to your plan – that’s extra time and resource which you might need to dip into if things do not go as planned.

Ok, you’re done with planning. Publish the plan to anyone who is working on it, and anyone you are doing the project for.  Let them all know what is going to happen, when it needs to happen, and when the whole thing is going to finish.

With the plan out of the way you now just need to do the work.  At this point you have stopped project planning, but the hard work of project management has only just started.   Now you need to make sure each task is completed on schedule.  This almost certainly means you will need to deal with problems.  This is the golden rule of project management – things go wrong.  You will need to fix up the problems to keep your project on track.

While you are running your project you should track your progress, regularly recording and publishing if you are working as planned.  You need to know how well (or badly) things are going, and your team will also be interested in this.  You will need to fix up those problems.  You may also need to do some re-planning if the problems you have encountered, or things you have learned mean the original plan no longer makes sense.

Project Complete?    When you get to the end of the project, celebrate and congratulate everyone involved.  Take a few moments to see what lessons you have learned from the project, and what you could you do better next time.

Now…start your next project.