TenForce – Pragmatic Project Management

I invite you all to read this guide. It’s the most down-to-earth project management book I have come across. I recommend it to everyone that asks me.

Why is it so good?

• It states that Project Management is not difficult. If you follow a few basic, easy to understand principles, you will deliver successfully.
• It focuses on execution, on what you do. There are loads of books that focus on methodology. While it is important to know these things, it more often than not obscures what you are trying to deliver.
• You can read it in one air trip.
• It’s free like in ‘free speech’.

What’s in it for us?

I hope you guessed it by now: our product is engineered around the same principles: simplicity, usability and quick and easy setup.

An example: Risk management

You can buy entire books that deal with risk management. Unless you are running a nuclear power plant, what you probably need is this:

Step 1: Identify each risk

• Title, description, illustration documents.
• Risk status. Something like ‘Identified’,
• Two key attributes: think long and hard about their values:
  • Risk probability
  • Risk impact

Step 2: Decide on a ‘mitigation threshold’

Mitigate is a fancy word for the things you do to make something less severe or painful. You do not need to worry about all risks. Use a simple threshold mechanism like the one below to decide which risks to mitigate:

The red ones need handling, the green ones you don’t need to worry about.

Step 3: Mitigation actions

The ones you need to handle, you have three options:

• Reduce probability of the risk occurring
• Reduce the impact when the risk would occur
• Do both.

Capture what new values you will have for the risk’s probability and impact. If it is still in the red zone, start over.
In TenForce, you assign mitigating actions to the risks. You define an owner, a due date and they get distributed among your team members.

Why do so many projects fail for risk management?

I just explained everything you need to know about risk management in 3 simple steps. If it is so simple, why don’t more projects succeed? My guess is because of the administrative overhead: without tool support you need to push through all these actions through your team. There is no real place for it and you need a hell of a lot of discipline to consistently remind your team about these actions.
TenForce handles this for you: the mitigation actions are all there on your team member’s to do lists along with the actions from meetings, the detail plan tasks, bugs, changes and issues. If you or your team forget about them, there will be indicators and alerts popping up all over the place.