If you're the Commanding Officer of the ship, and you bring on a qualified Pilot for a tricky mooring in a harbor, it's still your ship.
Risk management is not project management
11–20 of 84 posts
Re: Risk management is not project management
#12Where I think this article goes a little wrong is the assumption that a RACI is about risk management. A RACI can tell you who is responsible for running the risk management process, but the R (responsible) and A (accountable), are not meant to move risk and absolve all others. They're just markers for "who is going to get this work done". They are about managing work, not managing the risks that can arise from that…
would like to know more about risks, any books you could suggest ? thanks.
Re: Risk management is not project management
#13Odd side note. I asked chat gpt for feedback on the screenshot of a RACI and added some color on the parties involved and the scope of work.
It provided some really good analysis and recommendations.
Re: Risk management is not project management
#14You can outsource the work, you can never outsource the responsibility.
You can outsource the Responsibility but you can never outsource the Accountability.
Re: Risk management is not project management
#15Re: Risk management is not project management
#16> the project owner is always, in the end, responsible for the success of a project
This is very relevant to large government construction projects in the public-private partnership model (aka Alternative Financing and Procurement). These go best when the project sponsor (the gov’t) thinks clearly about what risks the private partner is best places to manage and transfers those risks to them (e.g. managing lots of construction sub trades), while retaining the risks that they are best placed to manage.
It becomes very expensive when the sponsor just tries to throw all the risk over the fence. As the author says, this gets expensive - either through change order or sometimes even in the upfront cost. If you pitch a risk to someone who is badly placed to manage it or who cannot quantify it upfront, they will cover their risk with a big fee.
You can shuffle the risk, but you can’t make it go away.
Re: Risk management is not project management
#17"We do not want the risk. The 3rd party must be accountable for this." Repeat ad infinitum. While it may look like that, dialog happens not because client representatives are dumb. It's because they are afraid. They have toxic corporate culture. It's not safe to fail or discuss possibility of failure. The usual, honestly. So they just want to have a chance to blame someone else and survive when everything goes south.…
> It's because they are afraid.
Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's just because they don't have to make themselves accountable for it because there will be no consequences - if it fails, you get to keep your current position and compensation but also if you succeed you also get to keep those without any gain. In these cases, not making yourself accountable is just the path of least resistance, and one could argue it's the right call for the individual in charge.
> Another fun red flag is vague definition of goals.
100%. I've been on clients where one of the criteria to determine success was "repeatability". When pressed to understand what that means, I could only get further vague and wildly abstract concepts. Nothing measurable, nothing even remotely helpful. Similar things happened for pretty much all other "requirements" we were given.
Re: Risk management is not project management
#18Odd side note. I asked chat gpt for feedback on the screenshot of a RACI and added some color on the parties involved and the scope of work. It provided some really good analysis and recommendations.
I've found it (GPT4) to be quite good at analyzing situations where roles & responsibilities have become blurred. I've asked it for recommendations on how to approach delicate conversations with the people involved and it gave solid advice. It was also useful in brainstorming potential objections that might come from those people and effective responses to those objections.
Re: Risk management is not project management
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can outsource the Responsibility but you can never outsource the Accountability.
Sure you can! Consultants/contractors are hired for that all the time.
Point well made, but I think they were trying to correct the usage of Responsibility. Responsible = Who does the work, which, of course you can outsource.
Re: Risk management is not project management
#20Honestly this feels like so much crap. I refuse to believe any project can be planned more than one "phase" out - that is one technical person can sit down and say "yes I see how all the parts can be done and I could do it given time and nothing else". Ie the next step onto a stone across the pond.
Anything beyond that is what I call the zipper delusion - the idea that with enough planning we can move ahead like a zipper and all the parts, the third party deliverables just come together like a zipper.
Nah. A delusion brought on be looking back at a project and going "hey we did it" as opposed to remembering the hellscape accurately
Yes enormous projects are achieved, but it's not like it's a plan - we know we can lay a train track on land that's about 2% gradient (the technical next phase) but the bit that lays train track from New York to San Francisco is not a plan. And this sort of stuff where people want third party risk offsetting and so on is much more "build train tracks over the State of ohio" - it's an adventure needing venture funding.
I think we would do much better stopping calling them plans and start calling them "ventures". You can be a venture manager for sure but stop asking for dates and deadline
So the real criteria for success for a project is "does this feel like Oppenheimer saying "we need to build a town in the middle of the desert for the worlds best scientists"? If so scale down your project or be very very sure your existence depends on not failing.