Organizational Risk Tolerance in Project Management

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As project managers, one of the important roles we have is assessing and managing risk for our projects.  But risk assessment cannot be performed in a vacuum.  The organization, customer, or end user needs to have a voice in how much risk should be tolerated.

Take, for instance, the NASA-manned space flight.  It involves risks to human life which can’t be completely mitigated.  On the other hand, many construction and engineering firms take a zero risk approach to human life and safety on their jobs.  Jacobs Engineering goes “beyond zero” in their approach to safety risks.

It’s interesting to think about the potential for conflicting safety standards within a project.  What if a beyond zero safety organization is performing project management for a firm that does not consider safety to be a priority?  The customer may see the money being spent to ensure safety as an unwanted cost, while the project management firm will consider these costs essential to their ability to perform work for their client.

Let’s move from health and safety risk to schedule risk.  In this case, the same potential for conflict arises if the owner and the PM don’t agree on what is tolerable schedule risk for the project.  But in this case, it is possible to use statistical modeling and forecasting to examine the probability of certain completion dates.
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The Other

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We at PMA sometimes get a bit myopic about scheduling. If it does not involve permits,  excavation, and foundations, then it must not be a schedule. However, there is a big, bold world of non-construction-related schedules and scheduling applications out there, being used every day. In the past, I’ve worked extensively with production scheduling applications for the job shop environment. I presented a paper on this topic at the PMI Global Congress a couple of years back, entitled Job-Shop Scheduling Can Assist in Improving Manufacturing Budget Control. Should you ever find yourself sleepless and completely out of Ambien, I would highly suggest that you download this paper for immediate relief.

One of the more fascinating subcategories of scheduling can be found in the aerospace and defense industry. When a fighter jet or commercial airliner is built, the outer limits of project management, product management, configuration management, and project controls are tested. Most likely, the issue of quality management is top of the list! An ill-fitting window in a building is a nuisance, but in a plane…?

One of the premier scheduling tools used in the A&D market is Deltek Open Plan. Deltek is an organization that has mastered the art of producing compliant output for working with the federal government. Within their scheduling tool, you can develop some of the most intense schedules in the world, including hundreds of thousands of activities.

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Using Time-Scaled Virtual Reality to Visualize and Reduce Risk in Construction

Wouldn’t it be great if you could see how a building will come together day by day, based on all of your drawings and your schedule – to really visualize the plan?  That might make a good blog url…

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4D BIM can accomplish this, to a certain extent. If you ask most practitioners what the benefits of BIM and 4D BIM might be, they will respond with clash detection, more accurate cost information, and facilities management. These are the classic benefits of 3D BIM; the actual level of benefit derived from the implementation of 3D BIM has been quite variable.

But if the model is built correctly, you can see the risks in construction before the first piling is driven.  For instance, you can see that your plan calls for two cranes to be in the same place at the same time, or that your plan calls for material to enter the jobsite through an opening that’s actually too small for the material.

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Using Visualization to Reduce Risk

When I worked for IBM, I had the pleasure of working with some of the smartest, most reliable people in the world. At the top of that list was a visionary leader named Jim Hile. Jim has a unique gift for seeing opportunities, and he is fearless in doing the work required to seize the  day.

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After his retirement from IBM, Jim invested in a struggling technology company in the virtual reality space (VR). Through his tireless work, great leadership and a healthy dose of capital, the firm was turned around and sold.  Jim saw the opportunity and seized it.

While Jim was running the firm, I got a tour, and a demonstration of how virtual reality systems work.  For those not familiar with VR, the most advanced systems are room-sized 3D immersion systems.  You can create any environment or simulated physical reality that you want. For those of you familiar with Star Trek, this is the closest we have come, so far, to a “holodeck.”

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Visualizing Schedule Risk In Your Mind’s Eye: You See Trouble Ahead

An Idiomatic and Sensory Investigation of Interactive Visual Risk Assessments

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What do we mean when we say “I see trouble ahead?” Notice that we don’t say, “I’ve reviewed a tabular report and I prognosticate problems,” or, “I touched the report you sent, and I feel trouble on the way.” Sometimes people say they can smell trouble, or smell trouble brewing, but most often it is seeing it on a wall, in a diagram, or in our minds eye that enables clear cognition of impending calamity. It’s fair to say that visualization is a key factor in recognizing risk in general.

When it comes to schedule risk, until recently, visualization options have been limited, and disconnected from the actual schedule. Until the development of the Graphical Path Method (GPM) and NetRisk, there was no way to see a schedule on a timescale and interactively visualize the impact of a particular risk on the schedule.

Most conventional schedule risk tools work by importing information from an outside scheduling tool such as  Oracle Primavera Risk Analyzer or Acumen Risk. Once the data is imported, it gets massaged further, ranged and iterated to generate a series of graphs and tabular reports. Experts then interpret these reports and recommend mitigating measures to apply to the schedule.

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Three Things You Must Know About Risk Assessment in Construction

The risk assessment is only as good as the model on which it is built.

The model is built through a process of gathering stakeholders, identifying risks and opportunities, estimating the potential impact and selecting risks and opportunities for quantification.

The quantification process must be disciplined and deliberate.  

Whether you are doing a cost risk assessment, a schedule risk assessment or a combined risk assessment, the process is straightforward. This process is called ranging. When you range a risk, you assign typically three numeric values to the risk: Optimistic, Pessimistic, and Most Likely. For a cost risk, the range might be expressed in dollars or in percentages.  In a schedule risk exercise, the range will likely be expressed in days, but can also be a percentage.

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Choosing a Risk Practitioner: It’s a Risky Business…

Risk assessment is becoming an industry standard. Unfortunately, at this point that is the only standard part of the process. Unlike, say, the field of medicine, you don’t need a license to be a risk practitioner in project management. However, there are a few certifications in the industry that, at the very least, will guarantee a baseline of knowledge and experience.

The Project Management Institute grants a credential called the Risk Management Professional (PMI-RMP). In order to qualify to sit for the exam, a professional must have completed at least 3,000 hours of risk practice. Then they must pass the exam, which is quite comprehensive, in order to get the credential.

In order to maintain the credential, the professional must participate in ongoing education.

AACE International offers a Decision Risk Management Professional designation, which is well regarded in the industry.

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