Risk Managemeent: Key to Advancing into Program Management

The Project Management Institute (PMI) introduced the principles behind program management with a critical focus on maximizing benefits.  Often project management focuses on controlling scope and schedule using available workflow tools that they miss an important component of not understanding the value of the project on a larger scale.

The question to ask here is what role did the project play in increasing the value to the performing organization, customer, and the society?  When we think about this and focus on the benefits, we step into the next stage of ensuring the project risk is constantly monitored.  There are various tools to managing risk but constantly keeping focus and most importantly the risk register.

Understanding these risks is a critical element to the next stage called program management.  Why? This is because the program management focuses on what an individual project can't deliver. The impact on value maximization is high in program management. If the risk is not more actively monitored, there will be too many interproject dependencies that may impact these projects more. So, when advancing to program management, active risk management is critical and is a sine qua non for project management excellence.

Furthermore, risk management is at the epicenter of value management. While project management focuses on delivering products, services, or results, program management focuses on benefits delivery. Since the extent to which businesses and customers derive the benefits describes value, in delivering products or benefits, lean principles advocate flow by avoiding delays. As the day passes, value should be incrementally built. Even when the project may not have been launched and the anticipated benefits realized, we monitor the progression of work so that projects don’t slip, tasks don’t wait, or decisions are not delayed. From the discipline of earned value management, this is why we even look at the 'value' earned in a snapshot in time!

One thing that I was very proud of in my current workplace is that there was an all-hands meeting from all account managers, project managers, development representatives, script writers, creative artists, testing team, and operational team members. The project management team was responsible for holding this meeting on a weekly basis at a predetermined time on Tuesday with remote representatives and traveling account managers on the telephone bridge. This meeting served as the 'synchronization' meeting where everyone synched on raising their part of the risks and issues as well as the impact to the project, client, and the revenue to be recognized by the company! Everyone was willing to pivot accordingly because there is only limited capacity of time/resources available! 

Now, will synchronization alone contribute to seamless value flow? Let us see. While each team had their independent meetings to discuss what was in their backlog. The creative team had a weekly meeting to discuss department specific projects and client specific projects. The development team had its daily standup with the onshore and offsite engineers. The account management team had their own retreats (that's the name they used) to discuss client and deal with specific issues. So, each team had its own cadence on when to meet, what to discuss, etc. 

Therefore, although both cadence and synchronization were present, some of the challenges that we repeatedly discussed in the synchronization meeting emphasized that there were other forces at play impeding value flow. The most common things that came up are the following:

• Lack of Visibility: There was no combined backlog or a visible backlog of what happened inside every team. If a team discussed a new project that is slowing work for other initiatives, that was a surprise!
• Multitasking: Some teams had a single person working on multiple things. For example, a creative artist was assigned to more than project extending the amount of time taken for both projects. This diffused the need for more resources required to meet the increasing demand. Delays in projects slowed value delivery and revenue recognition. 
• Size of the Work Commitments: Some work commitments made were large. There was not enough questioning of the estimates to the commitments made. Sometimes, there was only one single person available to do such work introducing the key candidate risk. 
• Complicated Workflow: Some review and approval steps in the process were unnecessary, increasing the amount of time taken for people to wait on those steps. The time zone and the manual processes fueled this fire further. 

I believe value is proportional to the waste reduced (value = f (waste reduced)). Some of these value blocking forces causing waste are common in many companies. We tried to address it by having cross-functional representatives in other cadence meetings, consolidating tools on a single ALM tool, introducing role-plays with team members rotating with others, and reviewing steps in the workflow to minimally required to ensure compliance. What other techniques could have worked? Please share.