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Project Planning and Risk Assessment

Guest post by: Robert Whipple

Article Overview: This article will describe two central issues in project management. Successful projects are built on good plans: unsuccessful ones are often caused by faulty plans. The ability to visualize risk factors and react appropriately is the basis for triumphant success, like the first manned lunar landing, or colossal failure like 9/11. This article looks under the hood of the planning and risk management processes.

Project Planning and Risk Assessment

Planning textbooks give an example of good planning with a house being built in just 5 months for $150K. Let's push the envelope a bit, and consider building a house (including foundation and landscaping) in 24 hours. I once saw a video where a team actually accomplished this seemingly impossible feat. This was not just assembling a prefab, but actually nailing every board and shingle and stringing every wire and pipe in one day. How did they do it? It was the result of years of planning. The team had to address paradigms and invent processed that we never consider. For example, they needed to invent plaster and cement that would cure in minutes rather than days. Then they had to figure out how to apply it before it cured. They had to find special ways of applying instant drying paint. They made liberal use of parallel operations. For example, they built the roof next to the house while it was under construction then hoisted it on top at the last minute. All of the materials were staged to be accessible to the construction crew at the right time, within seconds. They practiced the building techniques for each operation ahead of time and spent considerable effort interleaving the operations. It was the interfaces between activities that turned out to be the biggest challenge. For example, the wiring for the range hood had to arrive at the junction box within a few seconds of when the installer of the hood was ready to mount it.

The video showed the planning and practice activities in detail, then showed a 3 minute, fast motion of the entire 24 hour process. It was like a swarm of ants, going in and out of the structure, but it was choreographed with the precision of a Swiss watch. As they rolled out the final roll of sod and planted the last berry bush, the entire team (hundreds of people) gave themselves a round of applause. Honestly, I have to admit there is no way I would live in that house, but it was a super example of how exceptional planning can accomplish miracles.

There are a number of techniques for dealing with risk. I believe project managers need to establish an environment in which participants feel comfortable raising concerns and admitting mistakes. When the environment is not safe to raise issues, they come back to haunt the project: often with disastrous consequences. We saw a vivid example of this with the Challenger Shuttle disaster. The root cause of that problem was a NASA culture that did not encourage people to tell the truth without fear. The result was loss of life for the crew and hundreds of millions of dollars lost. Many projects have the same problem. Thankfully, most of them do not have the huge price to pay, but the success of most projects depends on how well leaders address this issue of trust.

I believe the world needs better tools for assessing risk. These are particularly hard to acquire in an environment of terrorism, where unknown enemies can strike anywhere at any time. Imagine being the Secretary of Homeland Security and trying to reduce risk. Fortunately, in the corporate world, things are not quite so unpredictable although Murphy's Law is in full evidence on most projects. How can you improve the ability to sniff out potential problems?

One interesting method is to "become your project." That is, you personify the product or project and actually feel the threats. I was a project leader on a disk drive many years ago. In order to identify potential failure modes, I had the engineers become various parts of the machine and discuss how they interact in the system. We were able to identify and cure a particularly nasty electronic problem with that method. You have to imagine you are an electron moving in the circuit and how it feels when you run into a resistor, for example. In this example the engineer described it as running a race and all of a sudden running into a pool of quicksand. It is a lot of fun and it helps people visualize potential problems. Another method is to use analogies. Compare a structural building to a person. The building has, skin, a brain, eyes, ears, nervous system, etc. Thinking through problems using analogies is fun and often surfaces unforeseen risks. What happens when the building gets a virus? What is the equivalent of a heart attack for a building? What happens when a building goes on a diet?

One of the most famous projects to identify and stamp out risk occurred a few years ago. We remember it as "Y2K." For more than a year, millions of technical people all over the globe worked to anticipate potential system problems and take corrective action before the world melted down at midnight on Dec. 31st. With that level of effort, the fateful moment came and went with barely a ripple. If all that potential problem identification had not occurred, we would likely have had some major problems all over the world.

Good planning and risk assessment are as essential to projects as gas and oil are for your car. Without gas and oil, a car is still a car, but it isn't going anywhere soon. Without good planning and risk management, your project isn't going anywhere either.

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Article Tags: assessments, leadership, mistakes, Planning, projects, risk, speed



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