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How Do You Identify Risks?
January 29, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Best Practices, Risk Management
How Do You Identify Risks? (#2 in the series Three Questions that Separate a Good PM from a Great One)
By Didier Thizy
Risk planning separates good PMs from great ones. You need to anticipate what could go wrong and prepare to deal with the situation. But a lot of companies and a lot of managers don’t identify risks ahead of time. They deal with problems as they come up, often when it’s too late. They always fight the latest fire, not thinking beyond the immediate problem.
Good answers include:
- Lessons learned from previous projects
- Talking to PMs who lived through similar past projects
- Finding comparable experiences online
- Hiring an experienced consultant to help assess the risks
- Formal methods like the Delphi technique.
But the top prize goes to talking to the team and stakeholders directly. Meeting with the team to identify project risks leverages the entire team’s knowledge and working together will spark new ideas.
If a PM doesn’t identify risks or think ahead, their answer to this question will show it. An answer like “We didn’t have time for risk planning” indicates a mentality of fixing problems only as they come up. An answer like “I look at the schedule myself and identify what looks risky to me” might indicate that the PM thinks they know better than their team.
While answering this question, a PM might also come up with the classics like losing a key player or taking a longer time to implement the project. When you see an answer like that, follow up by asking:
- What could you do to mitigate those risks upfront?
- Has that happened to you? How did the planning for your next project change because of it?
Sometimes candidates are able to identify risks… but don’t take the time to truly manage them during the course of a project.
Note: This article is part of a series about interviewing Project Managers.
Didier Thizy is a Director of Project Management at Macadamian, a global software consultancy that helps companies create software products that their customers will love, from concept to market. Didier is a certified PMP, and oversees a portfolio of projects and ships dozens of successful product releases a year.
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