Risk Management

There are a variety of reasons why risks are often overlooked in project management. First of all, it is necessary to acknowledge that it is impossible to anticipate every risk in a project. As a project progresses, unknown factors will arise, key people will become sick, vendors will be unable meet deadlines, even acts of God, such as natural disasters may occur and delay a project. Typically the best way to handle this type of delay is to build a healthy amount of padding in the project schedule. However, there are often known risks which are ignored and lead to delays, cost overruns or complete failures in projects. In the article, Top IT Project Risks and What to do about them, the author Vicky Haney lists the top 10 risks in IT projects.

• User Involvement

• Executive Support

• Requirements inflation

• Schedule Flaws

• Unrealistic Expectations

• Staff Turnover

• Project Manager-Skills and Abilities

• Specification breakdown

• Technology and Uncertainty

• Not knowing what’s at stake

Through my experiences with project that I encountered I came up with 3 reasons why risks where ignored:

• Lack of knowledge or experience - The project manager lacks the experience or knowledge to effectively anticipate and deal with risk.

• Fear - In some cases, the project manager may be afraid to deal with the risk, for example an uncooperative project sponsor or team member. In this case, the project manager may ignore it in hopes that the problem will resolve itself.

• Inability to perceive the risk - In many cases, especially where new technology is used; the risk is not visible at first.

Haney, Vicky. Top IT Project Risks and What to do about them. Retrieved from http://www.vbhconsulting.com/Articles/Top%20IT%20Project%20Risks%20and%20What%20to%20do%20about%20them-3.pdf on August 5, 2012