Delivering IT Projects

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The Best Laid Plans

Posted by Cathryn in : Project Management , trackback

You’ve put your plan together, you have your resources and staff lined up, everyone knows what they’re supposed to do and you’re all ready to go. What could possibly go wrong?

Evaluating the risk in a project is a huge topic, and whole books have been written on the subject. Its often true though that one of the easiest ways of identifying and evaluating risk is missed - that’s to take a good look at your plan. This exercise helps to identify missing tasks, as well as forcing you to consider ways of mitigating risk, and to plan for contingencies should they be needed.

A simple way to do this is to go through your plan and ask yourself:

• What could go wrong to make this task take longer (a cause of risk, which may suggest a mitigation). This is a good topic for a brainstorming session with team members
• What would happen if this task took longer (the impact of a risk, which may suggest a contingency)
• What are the chances of this task taking longer (the probability of a risk, which will, combined with the impact, tell you which risks are most important)

If the chances of a task taking longer are high, and you can’t think of a way of reducing that risk, then build a more likely time into your plan now. This sounds obvious, but it is amazing how many plans go wrong because project managers, sponsors and those doing the work set unrealistic targets or allocate less resource to a task than is needed. Keeping track of original estimates and final results on individual tasks over multiple projects helps to reduce this, and I’ll be writing about estimating here in the future.
If a task has a high risk of taking longer, and you can think of a way of reducing that now, then build it into the plan. A classic example here is to make sure you order equipment early in case there is a shortage. It may mean that you have kit sitting around in storage for a while, but that’s better than holding everything up while you wait for a world-wide shortage of an essential widget to ease.
If you have a contingency, and the impact of the risk is high enough, then make sure that the contingency is in the plan. If you decide that, should a development task start to slip, you will add more staff, start lining those staff up early, and bring them in as soon as it starts to slip rather than later when you’ve got a disaster on your hands. It takes time to find people, have them finish other work and induct them into a new project.

Keep this information in a spreadsheet or, perhaps, on your project plan. I’ve been known to use the extra text columns in MS Project for risk information, though it should also be kept on your risks register.

You will find that after you’ve gone through every task in your plan, your critical path may have moved, and you will certainly have discovered more work. If deadlines are tight, you will probably need to go back through the plan and look for ways to improve your timescales.

This will yield a far more realistic plan, which will give you a greater chance of achieving your project goals.

If you are responsible for an IT project in the greater London area, I am happy to offer you a one hour review session with no obligation to take further services. Please email me on cathryn AT cathrynsymons DOT com to arrange.

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