Archive : Programs

When using Active Risk Management (ARM) it is very easy to spend TOO much time and attention managing risks. By using the Pareto Principle to prioritize how you response to identified risks, you can assure your risk management efforts yield more benefit than they cost—in a simple, easy-to-understand manner…

There are four different techniques to manage identified risks. Some try to prevent them from occurring; others deal with the consequences if they do occur. Too few people realize that they have this many tools at their disposal. As a result they do not manage risk as effectively as they would like…

It is very easy to get so caught up in analysis paralysis that you never get around to actually responding to your identified risks. Estimating them instead provides a quick, low-cost way to figure out how big each of your risks are relative to each other. Risk estimation is easy when you remember that risk consists of two components: impact and probability—each of which has a simple proxy for quick estimation…

To actively manage risk across your enterprise, you will need develop an organization-wide consistent method to seeking out and identify risk. This requires two critical steps: 1) develop a clear definition of risk enterprise-wide and 2) teach your staff to seek out and plan for all types of risk: positive, negative, internal and external. Once you do this, you will be ready to begin planning for and managing response to nearly any situation of importance that is likely to occur…

Even the greatest Program Dashboard will not help if you do not use it to manage your portfolio more effectively. Here are 10 critical success factors I have learned in the process of using dashboards to drive successful outcomes on over 3,300 projects and programs…

Setting up metrics to manage and track a small project effectively is easy. Doing this for a large program or portfolio initially looks harder. However, it becomes easy once realize a program is simply a series of aggregated projects all working together to achieve a single objective. Once you do this, creating and using your Dashboard is easy…