| Articles » Using Project Management Software to Manage Risk in the Project Plan |
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Using Project Management Software to Manage Risk in the
Project Plan |
| by Dave Paradi |
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| If you are just using project management software to manage your
schedule and budget, you are missing out on ways that the software
can help you identify and manage risk in the project plan. |
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| Identifying Potential Areas of Risk |
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| The tools of filtering and sorting tasks in the plan can help us
identify where risk may exist before and during execution of our project
plan. Here are three specific ways to use the filtering and sorting
tools: |
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- Create a filter for tasks where the successor contains a specific
task id. This filter will identify those tasks that immediately
proceed a specific task. The value in doing this is to identify
where problems in a preceding task may impact a crucial point
in the project. This is best used to identify preceding tasks
for milestones, tasks with a deadline or tasks on the critical
path.
- Create a filter for tasks where slack is less than or equal
to a certain number of days. Slack is the amount of time that
a task can finish later than its scheduled finish date without
impacting the project end date. Tasks with slack equal to zero
are on the critical path, but these are not the only tasks that
are important. Tasks that are close to being on the critical path
(slack close to but not zero) may end up on the critical path
if slippage occurs and are therefore worthy of examination when
considering areas of risk in the project plan.
- Sort tasks on or close to the critical path by resource. This
will help identify which resources would impact the project the
most if they were to be pulled or had their availability reduced.
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| Building Risk Management Into the Project Plan |
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| Risk management is a continuous and proactive process that must
be managed throughout the life of the project. The priority of risks
change during the life of a project and new risks emerge, requiring
reassessment by the team. It is important that in the project management
software we build tasks into the Project Management section of the
project plan to re-evaluate risk and deal with the project scope changes
that can lead to new risks that need to be considered. We find it
most convenient to build into the project plan a series of tasks on
a weekly basis to analyze and respond to scope change requests. This
ensures that the project team has allotted the time to deal with changes
and raises the probability that the changes will be dealt with appropriately
instead of leading to scope creep. We also build in, usually on a
monthly basis, a re-evaluation of risk in the project. Previously
identified risks and new risks are re-prioritized, analyzed and responses
are determined. This makes risk management proactive instead of reactive.
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| Identifying Risks While Executing the Project Plan |
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| Project management software can help identify areas of new risk
while a project plan is being executed because it has features that
can highlight the effect on future tasks of what has already happened.
Here are two ways to use these features:
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- When entering actual task information, enter the task start
date, the actual work effort expended so far on the task and the
work remaining to complete the task. Then, let the software update
the remaining duration for the task and the new expected end date
of the task. The software can then automatically recalculate the
expected start and finish dates for the remaining tasks in the
project plan. This allows you to analyze the final end date or
any critical milestones or deadlines to see if they have been
impacted or if there are any additional risks that should be analyzed.
- When resource availability changes or a resource is pulled from
the project, you can use a filter to determine what future tasks
will be affected. By changing the percentage availability of the
resource in the software, you can recalculate start and finish
dates for tasks involving the resource and identify any additional
risks introduced by this resource availability change.
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| Project management software is a good tool for managing our project
schedule and budget. The above techniques will allow you to extend
its usefulness into the area of helping to identify and manage risk
in the project plan. |
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| For more information about this article, please contact bia™ at info@bia.ca. |
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| © David Paradi, Business Improvement Architects |
