PM War Stories #19 – Risk Management: Why opponents to the project are your most important external stakeholders

Download PMW_0019_Opponents_Are_Key.mp3 (30MB)

Understanding who your stakeholders are and how they directly or indirectly impact a project plan requires planning that will ensure the best communication and risk management strategy facilitating the navigation of the bumps project managers will face along the road.  Good project managers understand that disparate groups of stakeholders need to be best aligned together to create a powerful coalition of support.  More importantly, carefully managing the risk of your opponents that are often part of this equation must be diligently monitored in order to maintain stakeholder alignment.  As the expression goes – “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

In this episode, we look at the relationship between stakeholder and risk management by examining the story of the Fiddler on the Roof, Cape Wind (Cape Wind opponents), and a mining project in South America.

Our show is divided into two segments:

In Part 1, we will be talking to industry insider, Rich Maltzman who has over 30 years of project management experience. He is a Senior Manager in a large telecom's Global Program Management Office, looking after the career path, certification, development, skills management, etc. for more than 2,000 project managers. His current projects include Scope Crepe, a delicious blog about project management and life, and Fiddler on the Project, a book to help project managers keep their balance atop the roof consisting of the traditional project constraints (time, budget, and so on) and the change brought about by the project – all while producing a tune to inspire the various stakeholders. In this segment he will be sharing his insights and experiences on stakeholder and risk management.

In part 2, we sit down with industry insider, Dr. Wilhelm Kross, who is a recognized expert in the fields of risk and project management. He is currently a Senior Vice President with Marsh GmbH (a subsidiary of Marsh) and President of the PMI Frankfurt Chapter. During his career, he worked as a mine manager, functional manager and risk management specialist for assignments in more than 30 countries. His current professional endeavors focus on the management of complex and troubled projects, the application and implementation of operational risk and advanced decision analysis techniques in real life environments; and lastly organizational portfolio management to better align investments, products & service offerings, projects, and operations. In this segment he will be sharing his insights and experiences in the management of stakeholders and the mitigation of risks.

Music Notes

1. The opening of the episode – “Yearbook”
2. Interview with Rich Maltzman – “Wild Card”
3. Interview with Dr. Wilhelm Kross – “Windy City”
4. The closing of the episode – “Glide”

Comments

[Glen B. Alleman]

Wayne,
While the material in this episode is very useful for managing the project to success, the term "risk" management has been overloaded with the term "issue management." If an external has been identified along with the potential difficulties, this is an Issue that must be worked by the project manager.
By definition, risk is a probabilistic event with a probabilistic impact.
While not critical to bring the level of awareness of managing issues and risks for project managers, there is a fundamental gap in understanding about how to mitigte or retire risk from the project when issues are included.
One of the best sources for "risk management" is the DoD PMBOK and the DoD Risk Management Handbook and http://www.risk-doctor.com/. NASA as well as other government agencies that deal with Risk Management everyday als o provide guidance. Finally a good starting source for risk management tools is http://www.mitre.org/work/sepo/toolkits/risk/index.html.
While these sources may seen excessive, my experience in enterprise IT (ERP) has shown that when risk and issue is confused the resolution also gets confused and everything that is marked as a risk has no specific mitigation and therefore burdens the project with undo cost and delay.

[projectmanagement04]

Project management certification and accreditation is determined by the passing of two exams. The Foundation exam is a multiple-choice test that lasts for up to one hour. The Practitioner test is a bit more complex, mixing in objective testing with multiple-choice questions, and clocking in at approximately three hours.