The concept of tracking issues and risks on a project is rudimentary. It’s necessary to the life and success of the project and it’s an absolute must when you’re trying to ensure the long-term satisfaction of your customer. And it’s also something that we often easily overlook – or at least we don’t do a very good job at it.
Defined
An issue is a function associated with the project that may impede the continuation, impact the cost or manpower or otherwise adversely affect the project. An issue is something real, something that has been encountered and must be dealt with.
A risk is a potential issue that needs mitigation strategy to avoid impacting a project’s success potential. A risk is an uncertainty with some degree of likeliness to happen.
Managing Issues and Risks
So what’s more critical to manage….Issues or Risks? The answer is BOTH. It doesn’t really matter too much HOW you manage issues and risks, just that you manage them. It really doesn’t matter if you separate them out either – just so you DO actually manage them. Issues and risks are not something the project manager makes note of and then tucks them away somewhere on a sheet of paper.
Remember, if we don’t learn from our mistakes, we are destined to repeat them. How true! And if we don’t document issues and their impacts to the project as well as risks and their potential impacts to the project and likeliness to happen, then both types of these project ‘bumps in the road’ are going to hit us and they are going to catch us completely off guard.
Make Everyone Aware
So how do we manage issues and risks on a project? There are probably 100 different ways and every good PMO should have a template and process for managing issues and risks. The key is to document them, bring them to the customer’s attention and to the attention of everyone on your team and make a discussion of the issues and risks an on-going topic on your weekly status call. Make it a recurring piece of your weekly status report. Make sure that it is in front of every critical participant and decision-maker for the project every week. An issue that slips through the cracks can’t be dealt with and a risk that is ignored can not be prepared for and mitigated.
The Customer’s Role
The customer is often your best friend when attempting to resolve issues and mitigate risks. Remember, this is their project, too. They actually want nothing more than for you and your team to be very successful and they’ll often do whatever is necessary to help achieve that success. It is financially in their best interests to see that happen. So, be sure that they are always aware of issues and risks as they arise and make them an active player in issue resolution and risk mitigation. It’s rarely beneficial to hide issues or bad news from the customer and they’ll never truly understand the value and hard work required of the project manager if they think your job is too easy.
Summary
A repeatable, formalized process for managing issues and risks is critical. More critical than how you separate and differentiate between the two. On most projects, they are a combined list for me. It’s as simple as documenting them in detail on a spreadsheet – but the key is always to have them in front of every key person on both teams, assign followup to the right key people and review status every week (or more often when necessary) on the weekly status calls and status reports.