TenForce – Pragmatic Project Management

Isn’t that good project management? Early delivery, exceeding customer expectations and within budget! Even without managing his risks and issues. So why bother to do risk and issue management?

Well, Tom was just lucky and because most of us aren’t married to Katie Holmes we need to monitor and control our risks and issues.

But honestly (and I’m sure the furious anger of my fellow methodologist pm’s will strike down upon me now) there is little difference between a risk and an issue. Theoretically you have a clear definition: risk is and uncertainty of outcome that could impact your result; an issue can be “anything else”: bug, change request, concern or question… While risk management tends to be more preventing the fires; issue management is mainly fighting the fires.

In practice, the process to handle them is (almost) identical. Here’s how I usually take care of it:

• Create logs
  I always find it essential to list all project related questions, remarks, risks,…. Although the process is the same, I use two separate lists for issues and risks. In this way I can report separately to the project team (issues) and the board (risks).
• Find out more details
  I try to get more information (reasons, background, potential impacts, urgency, costs / benefits,…) so I can do my analysis based on solid data.
• Analyze
  Evaluation on priority, severity, impact, due date and who should take care of it. This will help prioritizing your actions.
• Take actions & follow-up
  Getting the wheels in motion to resolve the issue or mitigate the risk. In some projects this can take up a lot of your project management time. You’re not only ensuring the execution of your project schedule, but you also have to monitor and control the resolution of issues and risks.
• Tools
  Tools help you to centralize issues and risks. They help you to manage the status of actions to counter issues and risks. Tools bring visibility to the overall process.
  TIP: check out the Tenforce features that can help you on this. TenForce provides automatic alerts on issues/risks due and intuitive graphs with an overall view.

• Report
  To get guidance from my project board I report issues and risk that require decisions, help, input, …

Written down like this, it might look like piece of cake; but don’t be mistaken. It is often the most difficult part of a project because you’re ‘playing’ with the unplanned, uncertain, unforeseen ….

Exciting isn’t it ;-)

As always: please let me know what you think about it.

Cheers

—Jan