Risk management - General comments on planning
General comments on planning
Planning and all of its many facets is covered in much more detail elsewhere [see ‘The Complete Project Management package’] and [see 'The Complete Project Management plus PRINCE2'].
In the majority of schedules (part of the overall plan), the time taken to carry out a task will usually be based upon:
- An assessment by the accountable manager based on the experience of his staff. He will estimate how long the task will take with the available resource.
- Knowing that in fair weather it will take 3 weeks it would be common practice to add a week to give 4 weeks for the ‘assessed risk’. Better systems exist for estimating the ‘likely’ duration of a task given particular uncertainties. These will be discussed in more detail elsewhere.
When the task is underway it will be monitored to make sure it completes on (or ahead) of time.
This is the agreed plan sometimes termed ‘containment’ because resource has been employed to make sure the end date is ‘contained’ within the agreed time span.
The type of risk involved in this task will help to give a clearer idea of how easy it will be to get the task done.
If the task is drifting off track what can we do?
In general terms some areas to consider might be:
- The project is presumably going off track because of either an issue (unforeseen) has arisen or a ‘trigger’ has arrived (agreed previously) which tells the project team to implement the contingency plan. In this case we are implementing predetermined plans for a materialised risk. These are ‘reactive plans’.
- Adding more resource is common.
- Improving the experience factor involved may help.
There are many other ways to try to modify a plan in order to get it back on track. These might involve managing the Critical Path (see detail elsewhere in this area).
Of course, it may not be possible to get it back on track as far as the ‘base’ plan is concerned. We may be in the position of damage limitation when employing the contingency plan.
What happens if the end date of a particular task is going to be missed?
Well, it may be irrelevant to the overall project completion date if the task is not on the critical path (although all tasks going over their finish time use up resource and hence have cost).
If it is necessary to complete the task on time [see 'The Complete Time Management package'] as it is on the critical path then one way is to modify the SCOPE. That is, what the task is meant to produce may alter. Naturally, any change in scope will have to be agreed. However, there is little point in modifying the scope unless it still meets the absolute minimum requirements of the project.
All these points are discussed in much more detail elsewhere.