How To Help Your Team Manage Project Risk

A project
manager’s job isn’t just about managing the work. You are also responsible for
your team, and making sure they have the skills required to do their jobs.

Part of a resource
management plan is to build the skills of your team. Normally we’d think of
that in terms of the technical skills they need to deliver the project, like
taking a course in a programming language or brushing up their system
maintenance skills. However, you should also consider how good they are at
doing the work of projects – project management. Yes, overall project
management is your job, but why not make your life a little easier by helping
your team members understand how they can be better at getting the project
done?

Risk
management is a great example. It’s a structured process that happens on every
project and outside the project environment too, so it’s a fantastic skill to
learn to boost your career and broaden your skills – whatever your job title.

Here’s how
project managers can help their teams manage risk effectively, so that everyone
benefits from effective
risk management .

1. Identify project risks

First,
identify the project risks. This is the normal first step of project risk
management, and you’ll carry out your risk identification activities (probably
a workshop) as you would usually do.

During the
meeting give other people the chance to lead certain sections. A technical
workstream manager could take the lead on the technical risk discussion, coming
up to the front of the room and capturing responses on a flip chart for
example. This will give them some facilitation experience and help the team
think about how to elicit risk from a group.

They can also
get involved with other ways of identifying project risk such as:

• Documentation reviews
• Interviewing
• Preparing cause and effect
  diagrams
• Using risk identification
  checklists.

Log
the project risks on a risk log. You’ll come back to that later to update
it with the selected actions that you need to take to handle the risk.

2. Allocate risk owners

As the project manager, it’s sensible if you allocate the
owners for each identified risk, based on their skills, experience and
knowledge of the potential problem. Someone without much experience might
choose owners who aren’t a good fit, so for the moment keep this task for
yourself.

You can continue to coach your team through the risk
management process by explaining why you have chosen those individuals as the
risk owner.

You can also consider allocating two owners: a main owner
and a buddy. Either of these positions could be the most experienced of the
two. For example, on a low impact risk you can make the main owner the person
with the least experience – the person you are trying to upskill. They can be
mentored by an experienced risk owner.

On a high impact risk it would be a better choice to have
the experienced risk owner in overall charge of this risk and the inexperienced
team member work shadowing.

Remember that your risk owner allocation might need to
change later because you haven’t done a full risk analysis at this point. Once
you know the full scale of the risk it might be prudent to shift the risk
ownership around in the team (or provide extra support) so you do not expose
the project to problems unnecessarily.

Getting other people involved at this deep level also helps
avoid Group
Think .

3. Analyse the risks

The analysis process can be anything from making a
qualitative statement about the problem to a full Monte Carlo analysis.

This is where your team will probably need some help from
you or an expert risk manager. First, work with them to identify the best tool
for analysis. There are plenty to choose from including:

Qualitative assessment:

• Using
  a probability and impact matrix to provide a risk score
• Grouping
  risks by category
• Using
  expert judgement.

Quantitative assessment:

• Gathering
  data
• Using
  probability distributions
• Conducting
  interviews
• Sensitivity
  analysis
• Expected
  monetary value analysis
• Modelling
  and simulation like Monte Carlo technique.

Once you’ve helped your risk owners identify the best
approaches, you will further have to support them in carrying out the analysis
using the techniques of their choice.

4. Prioritise the risks

With the assessment of all risks complete, you can now start
to prioritise where your efforts should be spent with the team.

Explain how this risk fits into the whole project picture,
and how you balance the portfolio of risks across all projects. Providing the
context for the individual risk will help the owner see how and where it sits
in a list of project risks and then how that list relates to the programme
level risks and upwards on to the portfolio.

You may also have to provide a quick lesson in how your
prioritisation tool works. It could be as simple as a spreadsheet, but if you
are using enterprise project management software then explain how to flag the
priority of a risk in that.

5. Identify risk response strategies

Now you’ve got
your list of priority risks and the team knows which ones are the essential
ones to focus on today, you can decide which risk response strategy is the best
for this particular situation.

This is a
great step to hand over completely to the team. Let them come up with the best
method to deal with the risk, and provide some expert guidance as needed.

If you need to
get approval for your selected approach, then now is the time to put forward
your recommendations and get them signed off. Get the risk owner to lead on
this discussion. Be there to support them if necessary.

Read next: How to
select risks responses

6. Design a risk management plan

Once the risk
response strategies for each risk are identified, the risk management plan can
be produced.

A risk
management plan for a risk is basically saying what you are going to do to
handle the risk, based on the response strategy you’ve selected. So if you are
going to mitigate the risk, your action plan sets out what steps you are going
to take to do the mitigation e.g. talking to someone, doing some extra tasks,
allocating some budget for something etc.

At a project
level this is something you’ll want to do as the project manager. At individual
risk level, though, you can let your team have free reign to prepare their own
mini-risk management plans including the tasks, dates and resources they need
to manage their risks effectively. These plans can then be consolidated into
your project risk management plan.

When the full
project risk management plan is completed make sure you share it with the risk
owners and the wider team. It’s good practice to be open with information but
it also helps people understand what has been done with the data that they have
given you.

Update
your risk log with the things you are going to do.

7. Check in regularly

It’s now a
case of working through the tasks in the plan to manage the risks. Check in
with your risk owners regularly during the execution of the risk management
plan.

Evaluate how
they are doing and provide timely feedback so they can quickly get back on
course if they are struggling. Talk to them about how they are managing their
tasks and what they would do differently if they did it again, and how they
have found the experience of taking on more responsibility on the project.

Of course, the
easier route would be to skip all this and only use your experienced team
members for risk management on your project. That would be a mistake.
Upskilling your team gives you a greater pool of resources to draw form next
time and is a major contributing factor to building morale in the team.

Not everyone is going to enjoy learning new things and stretching their skills but target the ones who do. It’s also a good way of identifying people who have a natural aptitude for project work. If you notice any star performers who are really excelling at managing project risk, the next step would be formal risk management training .

The other spin
off benefit of helping your team take on more responsibility (and therefore
more tasks) is that you have less to do! The more you can delegate the routine
aspects of project management like risk, the more time you can spend on other
tasks that aren’t so easily handed off to someone else like stakeholder
management, and the more effective you can be together as a team.

An edited
version of this article appeared on the Twenty Eighty Strategy Execution
website in 2015.

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