Speaker 1: You cannot manage your project risks until you know what it is that you need to manage. So in this video, let's look at the different ways that you can identify the risks in your project. This video is sponsored by Risky Project. Risky Project is a complete suite of project risk analysis and project risk management software. It integrates with all major scheduling and planning tools and covers the complete risk management lifecycle. We often start our risk management process with a risk management kick-off workshop and when this is facilitated well, it can be both productive and fun. But frankly, too often project managers stick to just one favourite method for identifying risks

Speaker 2: and the commonest of those? It's brainstorming. So let's start with brainstorming, but let's learn how to do it right.

Speaker 1: After that, we'll see why it's not really that great and how to take it up a notch to fix some of the problems. But best of all, I've got five other approaches for identifying project risks that are all favourites of mine and all of which I've used in risk identification workshops. Let's start with brainstorming. In brainstorming, we invite the whole team to contribute ideas without limitation and we get them onto a board. To do this right, we probably need to be very clear about what it is we want and we also need to be clear that there is initially to be no discussion of the ideas. If someone's had an idea, we record it and then once we've recorded all the ideas, we can start to sift them, sort them, organise them and then evaluate them. However, brainstorming is not without its problems and perhaps for me, the biggest of them is managing a large group. There is so much energy in the room, if you do it well, that you may not be able to capture all of the ideas. What this then tends to mean is that some louder voices will dominate. They will just capture your attention. But even if it's not a large group, the simple fact is that some individuals are more assertive, more dominant than others. Indeed, the group may defer to certain individuals. Therefore, they can introduce a small but important bias. Their ideas frame the risks that other members of the group start to identify. They can funnel the team down a relatively narrow path. So we have these two major problems. The large amount of information that is coming at you and how to manage it. And secondly, the contamination of my ideas by your ideas. Both of these can be overcome by my second technique, brain writing. Brain writing allows much more parallel processing of ideas. Everyone is contributing their ideas simultaneously, which means it is ideal for very large groups as well as small groups. It also overcomes the bias because people are working on their ideas on their own without hearing and therefore being influenced by the ideas of people around them. So how does it work? Brain writing starts by giving everybody a handful of blank cards. You set up a scenario and then you ask everyone to contribute their ideas by putting one idea on each card and using as many cards as they wish. What I typically have people do is to throw their cards when they've completed them into the centre of the table or into a bowl or a bucket of some sort. This way you can get many, many ideas developed in parallel. The next thing to do is something that is harder to do with brainstorming. Which is to develop those ideas. In fact, the first stage of the developing of those ideas is to see if any of those ideas trigger new ideas for new risks. Randomly hand out a number of the cards to each person in the group and ask them in a fixed amount of time to look at the cards and to develop the ideas. If they can think of another risk triggered by that idea, they can write that down on a new card. If they can see a way to manage that risk or want to articulate a development of the idea of what that risk is, to specify it more or to explain it, they can add it to the card. With a number of rounds of this brain writing, you end up with a large number of cards all with a lot of developed ideas. The only real downside is that in this process we may well have some overlap of work because people will be working on cards with the same idea. However, there are ways to overcome that and there are worse problems than having too many ideas and some overlap between them. But beyond brainstorming and brain writing, I have five other ideas for how you can identify the risks. And the first is horizon scanning. Horizon scanning is looking out to the horizon of the project and looking for the specters of risks to come. And I purposely use the word specters because that provides us with a handy acronym, a mnemonic to help us remember eight common sources of project risk. So we can look out to the boundaries of our project and ask what risks are there that arise from social interactions or the interaction between the project and society or what sociological risks are there? Next, we can ask what political risks are there and remind the group that we're not just talking about capital P politics, national or regional politics or even global politics. We're also talking about the small p politics, the fact that when you have two people in a room, you have politics. The first E of specters stands for economics. And once again, we've got capital E economics, the macro economics of the region, the country or the world when the project is in operation. But we've also got the project economics, the financial considerations around the project itself. Related to this is C for commercial risks. What are the risks in terms of procurement, competition, other aspects of the commercial context within which the project sits? The T stands for technology. What are the technology risks that could impact our project? And then the R stands for regulation. What are the regulatory or legislative risks to your project? What regulation can change? What legislation do you have to comply with that if you don't comply with it, your project could get into trouble? The second E stands for environmental risks. And once again, we've got the macro environment, the global environment, if you like. But we've also got the local environment, the immediate environment of the project.

Speaker 2: And finally, S stands either for security risks or for safety risks. These are the threats that can harm us directly.

Speaker 1: You can use the specters mnemonic in two fundamental ways. One, you can work through it systematically on your own or with a group of people. Or secondly, as your group of people are working through one of the other approaches to finding risks for your project, you could prompt them with. Are we missing any political threat? Are we missing any economic threat? Are you missing any societal threat or any regulatory or legislative effects? My next risk identification method is a risk database. As a project manager, you should always be keeping a record of the risks identified and the risks realized on your project. Gradually build up a database of common threats that you encounter. If you've got a standard list of risks. And my project checklist pack has one. I'll put a link in the description. If you have a standard list of project risks, then you can use that as a great starting point. For identifying risks that are applicable to your project and contextualizing the wording around them. Next is the idea of a risk breakdown structure. A risk breakdown structure is a hierarchical decomposition of all the things that can go wrong on your project. So the first thing to start with is the top level categorization. And there are a number of ways that people do this. Certainly, you can divide your project up by stages or phases. You can also divide it up by the chunks of work. But we'll look at that in a moment. Commoner ways are to start with a framework such as, for example, specters. You could start with eight major sources of risk and then break each of those down. Another framework that is commonly used is time, cost, quality and scope. And another one is people, processes, strategy and technology. Once you have a high level framework, you can then start to break each one down and ask, what are the risks in that particular area of concern? My next approach is one I've already hinted at, which is to start with your work breakdown structure. And this can work equally well whether you use a task based work breakdown structure or a product based work breakdown structure. For each element of work or each product, ask yourself, what are the risks to completing that work or to delivering that product? If you need help on knowing how to develop a work breakdown structure, then I have a video to help you, which I'll put a link in the description. But critically here, the benefit to this is that you can now link your risk register directly to your work breakdown structure, your work breakdown structure dictionary. Each risk can have a unique reference number which extends your work breakdown structure. My final technique is the pre-mortem, which was developed by Gary Klein and documented in his fantastic book, The Power of Intuition. I'll put a link in the description. We have a full video on the pre-mortem, but in essence, it invites the group not to think about what can go wrong, but to imagine the project has come to its end and it has gone wrong. Everything has gone wrong. It's a complete and utter disaster, a fiasco. And then to ask the people what might have caused that. This looks for substantial risks, not just risks to your plan, but things that can existentially threaten the whole project. And then you invite people to work back through a chain of effects to causes and identify the risks to your project. Once you've identified your risks, the next step is to get them onto your risk register or into your risk database or some other risk management tool. We have a video on risk registers, but of course, this is where our sponsor Risky Project can come in. So if you need a sophisticated risk management tool, take a look at the link in the description. Please do give this video a like if you've enjoyed it or learn from it. I'll be making loads more great project management videos for you. So please do subscribe to the channel and hit the bell so you don't miss any of them. And I look forward to seeing you in the next one.