Managing risk is often considered a technical project management skill. There is a formal process to move a risk through from a concept or worry that someone has to a fully-analysed potential problem with an action plan, and then through to closure once the mitigation work has completed or the risk has passed.
However, there are some important personal qualities, or soft skills, that make some project managers better at managing risk than others. You can learn these – they aren’t innate so it’s perfectly possible to improve your risk management skills by practicing these soft skills and improving those too.
Listening
A project manager needs to be able to listen effectively when it comes to managing risk. Why? Because they need to understand the problem. If you don’t listen you’ll have no chance of following the arguments put forward by the project team member who identified the risk. You’ll also put your listening skills to the test when you are working together to come up with solutions – risk situations can be fast-paced as the environment changes and impacts the risk event, so you’ll need to keep listening to your experts to keep up.
Ask probing questions. Rephrase what you have heard and repeat it back to the person raising the point – this is a great way to clarify your own understanding. And if you are the kind of person whose mind wanders a bit during long technical debates then don’t be afraid to ask for an executive summary!
Team work
Work together to come up with a solution to mitigate your project risks. That means that the project manager has to be good at working with others and also good at creating an environment where everyone is able to work together. A participative style helps here – the ‘command and control’ style of management isn’t going to get everyone sharing in the brainstorming session.
Use interactive brainstorming software to capture all the options raised by your team. Then you can prioritise the solutions and work together to establish the best way forward.
Composure
To be really good at project risk management you should be able to keep your cool. Being composed in a crisis is a good thing – after all, this risk hasn’t happened yet so it makes no sense to panic about it.
Take your time to understand the situation and try to control the worries that other people might have. The reason you are working on mitigating this risk is to try to make the impact less significant if it happens. Right now is the perfect time to stay calm, so try to make that sense of calmness rub off on those around you as well.
Communication
Once you have established the options and your recommendation for dealing with this risk you can go ahead and talk to people about it. Good communication skills make it easy for you to do that. Whether you are talking to them in person, holding a meeting, writing a report or some other form of communication, the objectives are the same: make sure they understand what is going to happen next and how much of a problem this risk could be if you don’t act now.
Reliability
People need to see you as a reliable project manager – that’s your stakeholder community, your sponsor and your team. They need to be able to trust your plans so the more reliable they think you are, the easier it will be for them to work with you as they’ll believe that you have thought through the options and are presenting them with the best (which you are, aren’t you?).
Detail-orientated
Being detail-orientated isn’t everyone’s strong suit but it is a skill worth cultivating when it comes to project risk management. Risks are often complicated to understand and their solutions more so. Having the time and patience to focus on what is being presented and understanding the detail of the solution can make a big difference to what is achievable on your risk action plan. If you aren’t particularly detailed-orientated make sure that there is at least one person on your project team who is, and who could pick up some of these more tricky risk action plans as the owner.