If you’re in project management, then mitigating project risk is something you talk about often.
But how often do we account for risks arising from within our own teams?
There are three project management risks that seem to go under the radar until they cause a major spanner in the works.
In this article, we’re going to explore what these top 3 overlooked risks are, and what we can do as a project team both to recover if they happen and to prevent them from happening in the first place.
While there are many risks that can impact your project, I want to focus on the three most common reasons that risks appear within your project team.
Working in silos means that while the team is all working towards the same goal, they aren’t actually working together.
It’s a risk to project success because:
Stakeholders are a critical part of any successful project delivery.
When our team fails to work collectively to effectively manage stakeholders, it becomes a risk to our project because:
This risk can exist, even if your team isn’t working in silos.
It’s driven by poor communication, and it presents a risk to your project because:
So, what do these overlooked project risks look like in practice? And how do you overcome them if they happen on your project?
Let’s take a look at an example and a solution for each risk.
Problem:
Team members causing their own colleagues delays because they did not gather enough or the right information to continue progress.
Solution:
Create more opportunities to collaborate. Introduce a peer review process to make sure team members are getting different perspectives.
Problem:
Stakeholders are turning up to less meetings and not being as responsive to requests for information.
Solution:
Limit the number of stakeholder meetings by outlining the team’s weekly stakeholder needs and addressing multiple needs in the same meeting.
Problem:
Constant change requests or scope creep are occurring due to the project team discovering and taking on new scope of work.
Solution:
Set up a process to review scope change requests, which considers impacts the change will have on existing project commitments and identifies an accountable change approver.
There are plenty more examples I could give. And while solving problems on projects is part of the job, ideally we want to be drawing out these risks at the start of the project and putting measures in place to prevent them from happening in the first place.
Preventing risks is always a better option than trying to solve for them in the middle of a project (when they’re likely to have a much more significant impact).
Here are some ways you can mitigate the risks of working in silos, stakeholder management and project commitments on your project.
Working in silos, stakeholder management and project commitments present often overlooked risks within project teams.
While these are major project management risks that our own project teams contribute to, the great news is that there are plenty of ways you can recover from each of these risks if they are already your reality.
But the ideal situation with risk management, is to put measures in place to prevent the risk from happening at all.
And the best way to do this is to make sure your team has clear, open lines of communication. Talking to each other, and to your project stakeholders is the easiest way to discover and minimise risk.
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