Agile Risk Management Talk by Rowan Bunning

I attended "Agile Risk Management" presented by Rowan Bunning last night. Got to say, very well done Rowan for stepping in at the last minute. And I really mean the last minute, the scheduled presenter pulled out due to being unwell 24hrs before the event and Rowan came to the rescue. Rowan had given the same presentation recently, but still, I thought it was really good going, especially as I think we were a tough audience!

I picked up some good sound bites throughout the presentation.

1) If you want no risk, do not projects! Balance risk versus reward.
2) You can't eliminate risk, but you can manage it intelligently.
3) Impact map lays out the who, how and what of impacts were trying to have, as a mind map.
4) Creating a "safe fail" environment with iterations. Using multiple iterations, refine failed iterations making future success.
5) Risk Categories, business, social, tech, cost of schedule.
6) Which of the risk categories is most important to you?
7) Risk Discovery map. Assumptions, concerns and open questions. Used to facilitate risk discovery.

Rowan did a good interactive exercise around Risk Categories, separating the ground into sections depending on which Risk Category they thought was the most important to us. Once separated, we had to pair up and discuss why we thought our Risk Category was the most important. It was a great way to get people interacting and actively thinking and by having people only pair with other of the same view, it wasn't going to raise too many heated debates to be broken up before Rowan could continue.

PMI Sydney Talk - Risk Energetics

I attended a very interesting and inspiring talk hosted by the PMI (Project Management Institute) on 19th September 2013. I would highly recommend anyone involved in project based work to attend future PMI events.

I captured a couple of quotes that were the highlights of the talk for me below, but to get the full environmental energy and experience you'll have to attend next time!

The event was titled "Risk Energetics" with the very well presented speaker Dr David Hillson. More information can be found on Dr Hillson's website - www.risk-doctor.com.

This quote is one of the more common excuses for not dealing with risk management.
"I'm too busy to worry about things that might not happen! I've got to deal with what is happening".
It's very much an argument we have when under pressure, should we have a reactive or proactive approach? I expect we can all related to this and the difficulties associated when in different situations.

"Ability to manage risk is the difference between success and failure."
You could loosen the terms and say that the ability to manage risk is the difference between being thorough and complete AND potentially recklessly gambling or fingers crossed hoping! But certainly as a responsible project manager, even if the risk never eventuates, if you've failed to manage that risk (document, measure impact and likelyhold, plan mitigation, monitor and release), you've failed to project manage properly.

"Identify and plan response stages of risk planning require creativity."
This was very interesting about keeping energy levels up, attention focused and enthusiasm during risk planning workshops. Risk planning requires creativity and creativity requires motivated participants.

This is gold and does not really require much explanation...
"Some projects moonwalk. To moonwalk is the appearance of moving forward when actually moving backwards".

Dr Hillson promoted this book "Ruth Murray Webster - facilitating risk meetings" and ran through a few themes of resistance to risk and techniques to combat them.

Energy Sappers
- Risk process takes time and money.
- responses cost money
- it's just scare mongering
- too busy
- too late, my risks are built in
- it's just common sense

Common themes for team not engaging in risk management
- disinterest
- distraction
- disillusioned

Common solutions to promote risk management engagement
- education/explain
- focus
- demonstrate value

What can be done to Maintain levels of energy throughout the project. Renewable risk energy. Breaks, demonstrated value, education.

I loved one of the final quotes from the talk.
"The beatings will continue until the moral changes...".

Another that I was not so keen on around implementing change and change management (and I believe there was more context around it) was.
"Change the people. If that doesn't work, change the people"!

Inspiring talk as always. I look forward to the next one.