Each project is unique, with different requirements for different customers. Thus, project managers require optimal project management tools and techniques that are flexible enough for them to adapt to their own requirements and to deliver their specific project needs.
When projects create risk registers in independent systems, such as separate spreadsheets, it becomes difficult to integrate the different data sets to form a comprehensive picture of all the projects for the organisation. This becomes particularly troublesome when each project identifies separate risk scoring mechanisms or uses different nomenclature to describe the risk approval states or completion status.
The obvious solution is to create a single risk system to compile all the project risk registers. However, this introduces constraints on the projects to follow common approaches which may not fit with their particular project requirements. Projects want to be free to use their own methodologies, whilst the organisation needs to standardise each project so that they can be compared with each other!
Is it possible to create a common system within which each project can achieve its unique requirements?
Most organisations will have adopted one of the common frameworks for standard risk methodology. Both the PMI and ISO31000 frameworks advocate similar approaches to managing risk. These include contextualising the situation, identifying what could happen, defining what can be done, understanding the effects of action then monitoring, reviewing and communicating results.
Whilst such frameworks create sensible structures, the precise way in which each of these several steps is conducted is left open to interpretation by the organisations that adopt them and the projects that implement them. It is within these implementations that the unique differences for projects are magnified.
Some limited examples of these differences include:
When stand-alone systems risk registers are created to cater for the unique requirement of the particular project, the above-mentioned differences have no effect on the way the project performs. There are no right or wrong answers when deciding how to manage the risks on any given project. The crucial point is that someone, somewhere is looking at the risks!
However, these small differences become a significant problem when different projects need to be reported against each other.
Programme Directors and other Senior Managers should care about individual project performance. At the same time, they should be concerned about how each of those projects is performing as a part of an organisation, be that a dedicated programme or as a member of a loose project portfolio. This is where the standard individual approach to risk registers starts to fall apart.
Some of the common questions that Programme Directors should be asking include:
Attempting to pull together answers to such questions is not a simple task when each of the risk registers has been constructed in different ways. Indeed, obtaining the data in the first place can be tricky. Ensuring that the data is up-to-date and not likely to change after analysis is another issue. Once the data has been sourced, aligning it to a common standard can be problematic. A significant risk on a million-dollar project may well be inconsequential on a billion-dollar project. Reconciling the meaning of qualitative impact assessments between vastly different project types cannot be achieved easily without a common understanding of the qualitative meaning.
The time taken for a risk analyst to pull together such reports for medium to large organisations can be a full-time job.
Although at first sight it would appear that project risk management and portfolio reporting have very different requirements of risk registers, the problem may not be as acute as it first appears.
Software such as Safran Risk Manager bridges the gap between the two needs by allowing sufficient customisation of the set-up to meet the unique needs of the project, whilst maintaining common baselines against which all projects can be reported on.
These set-up specifications include:
Once portfolio reporting capability is integrated into the design of the software solution, generating portfolio reports moves from being a full-time task to the press of a button.
As such, risk data analysts can use their time more effectively to better study the results of the report and aid in interpreting the meaning.
Safran Risk Manager can:
Are your project managers taking their own approaches to managing project risks which makes it difficult to track and report on?
Safran Risk Manager is specifically designed to let project managers meet their own project requirements, whilst still enabling the central coordination of data from within the same operating environment. This not only saves significant time, but also ensure consistent and accurate representation of the data. Get in touch with one of the Safran experts today and request a free trial of Safran Risk Manager.