Risk Management

The Risk Management Process

Video: 📹 The Project Management Plan - Part 1 (data source: youTube: Dave Litten, 2011) Accessed date: 07/06/2016.

Video: 📹 The Project Management Plan - Part 2 (data source: youTube: Dave Litten, 2011) Accessed date: 07/06/2016 .

Risk Register

This collection of risks is called the risk register. A risk register is a document that contains results of various risk management processes, often displayed in a table or spreadsheet format.

💡 Examples of Different Risk Types

💡 Risk Types and Examples

What If Questions

Strategies to Help Manage Risk

Risk Strategies

There are four basic strategies that can be used against negative risks:

Risk Indicators

Managing People

Managing People

People Management Factors

Team members should all be treated in a comparable way without favourites or discrimination.

Different team members have different skills and these differences should be respected.

Involve all team members and make sure that people’s views are considered.

You should always be honest about what is going well and what is going badly in a project.

Case Study: Individual Motivation

Alice is a software project manager working in a company that develops alarm systems. This company wishes to enter the growing market of assistive technology to help elderly and disabled people live independently. Alice has been asked to lead a team of 6 developers than can develop new products based around the company’s alarm technology.

Alice’s assistive technology project starts well. Good working relationships develop within the team and creative new ideas are developed. The team decides to develop a peer-to-peer messaging system using digital televisions linked to the alarm network for communications. However, some months into the project, Alice notices that Dorothy, a hardware design expert, starts coming into work late, the quality of her work deteriorates and, increasingly, that she does not appear to be communicating with other members of the team. Alice talks about the problem informally with other team members to try to find out if Dorothy’s personal circumstances have changed, and if this might be affecting her work. They don’t know of anything, so Alice decides to talk with Dorothy to try to understand the problem.

After some initial denials that there is a problem, Dorothy admits that she has lost interest in the job. She expected that she would be able to develop and use her hardware interfacing skills. However, because of the product direction that has been chosen, she has little opportunity for this. Basically, she is working as a C programmer with other team members.

Although she admits that the work is challenging, she is concerned that she is not developing her interfacing skills. She is worried that finding a job that involves hardware interfacing will be difficult after this project. Because she does not want to upset the team by revealing that she is thinking about the next project, she has decided that it is best to minimize conversation with them.

Comments on Case Study

Personality Types

- Task-oriented people, who are motivated by the work they do. In software engineering.

- Interaction-oriented people, who are motivated by the presence and actions of co-workers.

- Self-oriented people, who are principally motivated by personal success and recognition.

Motivation Balance

Teamwork

Teamwork

The development schedule for most non-trivial software projects is such that they cannot be completed by one person working alone.

Managers must do the best they can with the available people.

Video: 📹 Effective Team Work and Collaboration (data source: youTube: TheArtmadillo, 2010) Accessed date: 07/06/2016

Group Cohesiveness

- Group quality standards can be developed by the group members.

- Team members learn from each other and get to know each other’s work; Inhibitions caused by ignorance are reduced.

- Knowledge is shared. Continuity can be maintained if a group member leaves.

- Refactoring and continual improvement is encouraged. Group members work collectively to deliver high quality results and fix problems, irrespective of the individuals who originally created the design or program.

Case Study: Team Spirit

Alice, an experienced project manager, understands the importance of creating a cohesive group. As they are developing a new product, she takes the opportunity of involving all group members in the product specification and design by getting them to discuss possible technology with elderly members of their families. She also encourages them to bring these family members to meet other members of the development group.

Alice also arranges monthly lunches for everyone in the group. These lunches are an opportunity for all team members to meet informally, talk around issues of concern, and get to know each other. At the lunch, Alice tells the group what she knows about organizational news, policies, strategies, and so forth. Each team member then briefly summarizes what they have been doing and the group discusses a general topic, such as new product ideas from elderly relatives.

Every few months, Alice organizes an ‘away day’ for the group where the team spends two days on ‘technology updating’. Each team member prepares an update on a relevant technology and presents it to the group. This is an off-site meeting in a good hotel and plenty of time is scheduled for discussion and social interaction.

The Effectiveness of a Team

You need a mix of people in a project group as software development involves diverse activities such as negotiating with clients, programming, testing and documentation.

A group should be organized so that individuals can contribute to the best of their abilities and tasks can be completed as expected.

Good communications between group members, and between the software engineering team and other project stakeholders, is essential.

Selecting Group Members

Assembling a Team

- Project budget may not allow for the use of highly-paid staff;

- Staff with the appropriate experience may not be available;

- An organisation may wish to develop employee skills on a software project.

Group Composition

- Task-oriented - everyone wants to do their own thing;

- Self-oriented - everyone wants to be the boss;

- Interaction-oriented - too much chatting, not enough work.

Case Study: Group Composition

In creating a group for assistive technology development, Alice is aware of the importance of selecting members with complementary personalities. When interviewing potential group members, she tried to assess whether they were task-oriented, self-oriented, or interaction-oriented. She felt that she was primarily a self-oriented type because she considered the project to be a way of getting noticed by senior management and possibly promoted. She therefore looked for one or perhaps two interaction-oriented personalities, with task-oriented individuals to complete the team. The final assessment that she arrived at was:

Alice—self-oriented

Brian—task-oriented

Bob—task-oriented

Carol—interaction-oriented

Dorothy—self-oriented

Ed—interaction-oriented

Fred—task-oriented

Group Organisation

The way that a group is organised affects the decisions that are made by that group, the ways that information is exchanged and the interactions between the development group and external project stakeholders. Key questions include:

- Should the project manager be the technical leader of the group?

- Who will be involved in making critical technical decisions, and how will these be made?

- How will interactions with external stakeholders and senior company management be handled?

- How can groups integrate people who are not co-located?

- How can knowledge be shared across the group?

Informal Groups

Group Communications

- The larger the group, the harder it is for people to communicate with other group members.

- Communication is better in informally structured groups than in hierarchically structured groups.

- Communication is better when there are different personality types in a group and when groups are mixed rather than single sex.

- Good workplace organisation can help encourage communications.

Key Points

Glossary