0.11 Project planning  (Page 19/21)

1. Avoid: The best thing that you can do with a risk is to avoid it. If you can prevent it from happening, it definitely won’t hurt your project. The easiest way to avoid this risk is to walk away from the cliff ( [link] ), but that may not be an option on this project.
2. Mitigate: If you can’t avoid the risk, you can mitigate it. This means taking some sort of action that will cause it to do as little damage to your project as possible ( [link] ).
3. Transfer: One effective way to deal with a risk is to pay someone else to accept it for you ( [link] ). The most common way to do this is to buy insurance.
4. Accept: When you can’t avoid, mitigate, or transfer a risk, then you have to accept it ( [link] ). But even when you accept a risk, at least you’ve looked at the alternatives and you know what will happen of it occurs. If you can’t avoid the risk, and there’s nothing you can do to reduce its impact, then accepting it is your only choice.

By the time a risk actually occurs on your project, it’s too late to do anything about it. That’s why you need to plan for risks from the beginning and keep coming back to do more planning throughout the project.

The risk management plan tells you how you’re going to handle risk in your project. It documents how you’ll access risk on the project, who is responsible for doing it, and how often you’ll do risk planning (since you’ll have to meet about risk planning with your team throughout the project.)

The plan has parts that are really useful for managing risks.

• Risk categories that you’ll use to classify your risks. Some risks are technical, like a component that might turn out to be difficult to use. Others are external, like changes in the market or even problems with the weather.
• Risk breakdown structure (RBS) is a great tool for managing your risk categories. It looks like a WBS, except instead of tasks it shows how the risks break down into categories.

It’s important to come up with guidelines to help you figure out how big a risk’s impact is. The impact tells you how much damage the risk will cause to your project. A lot of projects classify impact on a scale from minimal to severe, or from very low to very high. The plan should also give you a scale to help figure out the probability of the risk. Some risks are very likely; others aren’t.

Quality planning

It’s not enough to make sure you get it done on time and under budget. You need to be sure you make the right product to suit your stakeholders’ needs. Quality means making sure that you build what you said you would and that you do it as efficiently as you can. That means trying not to make too many mistakes and always keeping your project working toward the goal of creating the right product!

Everybody “knows” what quality is. But the way the word is used in everyday life is a little different that how it is used in project management. Just like the tripe constraint, scope, cost, and schedule- you manage quality on your project by setting goals and taking measurements. That’s why you need to understand the quality levels your stakeholders believe are acceptable, and that your projects meet those targets; just like it needs to meet their budget and schedule goals.