After almost two weeks I have returned from Kuala Lumpur attending and presenting at the PMI Global Congress for Aisa Pacific. What a great experience.

Thanks to the PMI Team putting this great Congress together. Thanks to SK for taking us on a tour, thanks to Tim for the great accompany, thanks for Robert for the great feedback on my first run of the Risk Management Workshop and thanks to everybody attending my two sessions. It has been a pleasure presenting in fron of you, it has been a pleasure to see your participation and it has been a pleasure to share so much expertise during the hours we spent together. Also thanks to everybody for their keenness to receive the slides and the templates.

First of all the slides. You can click through them right here or download them from the slideshare.net website. The templates will be emailed to the ones that have dropped me their business card. Feel free to comment in this post I like to hear your comments about this Congress.

As we were just talking about how to present a risk, just found another way how to play around with your risks.

A tool to drag and drop your risks after you have created it within the 4 stages (unassigned, low, medium, high). But that was it. All the other items you would associate with a risk are missing plus what you associate it two. Every Project Management software has this capability today (may be not with the draging feature). Nice try but useless.

via ITprojectGuide

It has been a while back that we looked into the series how to present a risk profile to an audience.

The last time we discussed and looked at the standard way of presenting by the two axes likelihood and consequence. This time its about the “Heat Map“, an approach we have learned from Liam Wallace at the IQPC Project Risk Management Conference.

He uses the following picture to express a risk profile.

Its especially capable to show the level of risk in specific areas (eg. Human Resources, Financials etc.). As the two dimensions are “project” and “area” it can be used if you are managing a Programme of Work or a Portfolio or you are Manager of a PMO.

The key benefits are that you are able to identify areas of common risk in most of the projects.  For Example you have a financial risk in amber or red in most of your projects and all other areas are more or less green. That would clearly show that you have a common problem in the financial area.

You are also able to do the same on a project level. If one project has higher risks in most of the areas and all other projects show more or less green then there might be something wrong with that particular project.

The People attending the conference had very positive feedback on that chart as it is very powerful because of the reasons mentioned above.

After attending the IQPC Project Risk Management Conference, one of the key questions that have been raised throughout the Conference was “How to present a Risk Profile of a Project to a specific audience”. We have been talking about risk registers and processes for years, but when it comes to presenting the outcomes we fail. 

We present completed risk registers, scare people away with that, try to engage an inmature audience by completing the registers and wonder why they do not come back to the party (risk assessment or participate in the process.

This series (will have like 4 or 5 episodes planned over the next 2 weeks) will try to introduce and explain several options how to present a risk profile to an audience.

So lets start of with the most common one.

The Likelihood and Consequence Diagram:

According to the the Australia/New Zealand Standard for Risk Management (AS/NZS 4360:2004) a risk is defined by as

…the possibility of something happening that impacts on your objectives.  It is the chance to either make a gain or a loss.  It is measured in terms of likelihood and consequence.

The Likelihood is usually measured in 5 different levels, from “Almost Certain” which is the highest level to “Rare” which is the lowest level and 3 levels in between.

The Consequence is measured also in 5 different levels, from “Catastrophic” which is again the highest level to “Insignificant” which is the lowest level.

In  risk assessment or when a risk is being identified or revisited the likelihood and consequence are measured (based on company policy or method) and assessed. The outcomes of that assessment could be put on that diagram. 

And the risks in the “High Risk Area” you would focus on and need to mitigate. However, that all depends on your organisation and policy around which risks to treat and which not.

However, that chart / diagram and the risks visable on that diagram are a great method to attract attention of the audience you are presenting the risks to.

In Part 2 we will look at the so called “Heat Map” which we have seen in a presentation from Liam Wallace at the conference.

I have just returned from my first “conference” organised by IQPC. The question that I wanted to answer by looking closely at the event, whether it’s worth going.
The answer is -> if you can afford it -> Yes!
So the question is -> why ?

The Concept is a boutique conference that is targeting and audience of between 40 to 60 people for a niche topic like “Project Risk Management” or “Road & Rail Infrastructure” or “Negotiation Skills for Contracting”. So aiming at a very specialised Audience. The advantages that come with that is you will just see your peers in the audience which is a great networking opportunity and you are able to share experiences and issues and find resolutions or new ideas immediately. At regular conferences you have to identify your potential peers and topics to talk about as the audience is bigger and wider spread. The presentations are focusing on the particular topic and just on that.

Yes, IQPC is a marketing company, that’s there bread and butter, its all about bumps on seats and sometimes they take it a little bit to far as some of the participants fead back to me, in finding and identifying addresses to send their little flyers to with programs of upcoming events. Aggressive but positive for them. How ever, just with that concept they are able to taylor and identify the audiences required to fill an event and make it worthwhile for the participants.

The feedback forms will and can be used to identify high qualified speakers and make sure that they are speaking at the next event for a similar topic. And those feedback forms have been used a lot by the participants. Jacquie Bran, one of the General Managers for IQPC, stays in close contact with the presenters and makes sure that both parties are able to benefit from each other.

The Masterclass and the Workshops, which is somehow the frame for the conference, are intimate events that are great for sharing experiences and lessons learnt. And that’s because they are so small from an audience perspective and participants get a lot out of that approach.

Yes, its expensive, but as i mentioned in my previous post, if you have a company paying for it that’s great, if not and you find it to expensive, GO and SPEAK and PRESENT as you get the conference for free (beside the time you have to spend preparing and are out of your job). In other conferences speakers just  get a discount and need to pay that discounted price for the conference.

A lot of participants wondered that neither the Speakers nor the Chairman do get anything out of that (beside a potential compensation for travel and accommodation). The speakers expose themselves to the audience, will get feedback after the presentation by talking to people as well as based on the feedback forms and have a reason to prepare a topic and make it a presentation which forces preparation and research and as long as that concept works to engage speakers, why change. The only with that is, that many speakers from the Government are attracted as they do not have to take a day off for that as they can prepare the presentation during their “working time” as well as present as “working time”. Might be a reason why we had a lot of presentations from the Government.

What to improve:

Speaker selection and topic selection could be a little improved. Sometimes the speakers have been selected and the topic was already printed in the Program therefore the speakers had to squeeze their presentation into the topic. Also some of the speakers have not been exposed to IQPC before they have been selected, so no QA took place, which is quite a risk. How ever, Jacquie mentioned that this is the exception and almost everybody gets spoken to prior before they are selected, and the clear evidence of that was that Jacquie had to rush off one evening to do a telephone call with a potential speaker out of Denmark.

There should be the option to do networking in the evening, like a dinner function or networking at the bar. Most of the delegates stayed at the venue anyway, so would have been a good option to enforce that especially between the 1st and 2nd day of the conference. As most of us enjoyed talking to the peers this would provide another option to make the event even more valuable.

Just returned from the IQPC Project Risk Management Conference with Food for Thought and a Summary on all 4 days that I attended and participated in.



1) Masterclass by Kathleen  Kuryl

A very well conducted and facilitated Workshop by Kathy (President of the Tasmanian AIPM Chapter) and even if she was that nervous that she had to get up at 0530 in the morning you could see a thing of that . We got a lot of insights of the Project Methodology that has been put together by her and her team and is fully available on their website. The session was very much focused on the Risk Management component of the method itself. Kathy printed a lot of material and provided that as a hand out for the participants (overall around 7). The Masterclass was very intimate due to the fact that we just had a small audience like this and Kathy got a very good discussion going which helped us to understand how Risk Management is being applied by other industries. Another perception was that Government and Construction was very well represented in the Masterclass and in the overall conference. 

In the Afternoon we focused on a couple of areas. 

• How to present a risk profile to various audiences like stakeholders, steering group members, team members etc. (will have another post on that soon)?
• How to practical apply Risk Management in you day to day project management work?
• How to facilitate a risk assessment with an immature audience?

Another good point, that was raised, was that Lessons Learnt that you do after a project or a phase / stage has finished should drive and influence future risk assessments. So a two page summary of the outcome of a lessons learnt session was recommended (1. Area of project to get the reader to understand if they run a similiar project, set the context etc.; 2. Circumstances and Situation the project was running in; 3. Scope of project; 4. The Lessons Learnt summary)

2) Two days of conference

11 presentations and two interactive discussions, and each one of them scheduled for 45 minutes, plenty of time and opportunities to network was the structure for these days. Around 50 to 60 participants and everyone of them actively working in the Project Risk Management area, in one or the other role.

The three presentation highlights for me have been

1. Liam Wallace from ASC - about Comprehensive Risk Identification, Analysis and Planning
   Liam came across very knowledgeable and for sure coming out of a mature organisation where Risk Management is enforced and embraced. He has given us practical examples of risk registers, presentation options of risk profiles, their risk appetite and how they change the risk appetite according to the project. The “Heat Map” was definitely a very valuable tool that ASC is using to present risks to board members. He also referred to that how to identify risks constantly and how you can keep that simple. The slides have been great in a way they can be used for further reference, depending on how much he was allowed to put on the CD that was handed out.
    
2. Eddie Stewart from Newcastle City Council - about Applying Project Structure
   Eddie was talking about how Project Management Frameworks and Risk Management Strategies go together and his slides were just great as they provide a great reference to how the Newcastle City Council does Project Management and how they run projects and, most interesting, what projects they are running, which for somebody like me out of the private business environment was quite interesting. From an asset management side of thinks IT people often just think about PCs and Monitors and that such as assets, but for the City Council there are more than 70.000 trees and every tree is treated as an asset with additional information about size and age etc. Make sure you get a hands on the slides as they provide a good point of reference.
    
3. Rob Loader - Analysing the complexity of stakeholder management
   Rob was talking about the difficulties as well as critical success factors around Stakeholder Management in the context of risk management and was referring to the challenges how to understand your stakeholder, why you need to understand them and how. So referring to the question how you can understand a stakeholder that you never get exposed to he gave a couple of examples like waiting at the elevator until he shows up and give him the “elevator pitch” or wait for him at the car park near his car and give him the “car pitch” or just go and constantly ask for 15 minutes of his time. But clear advice was, you need to understand him and do everything to achieve that. His slides are another good point of reference. Clearly visible that Rob has done plenty of presentations in his career.

Regarding the interactive discussions about budget forecasting and software for risk management I dont know whether the delegates got much out of that. Haven’t had and heard much feedback around that area, but at least the crowd was engaged and shared experiences to the audience. Which helped for the networking as you knew whom to talk to about specific topics.

3) The Workshop - How to Identify, Measure and Manage Risk Throughout the Life Cycle of the Poject

We had a couple of cases prepared for this conference plus a short introduction of the Diamond Model based on the book “Reinventing Project Management” by Aaron J. Shenhar and Dov Dvir and how it could be used as tool to start facilitating a risk assessment and to present a risk profile of a project. A great discussion we had, around the model its use and how different industries and their projects are related to the model and how the projects could be mapped with the model. After that we had another very good discussion around how to embed a simple risk process in your day to day work and how to present risks to various audiences and several great ideas got shared between the attendees. Again, a very intimate workshop which was probably the biggest asset as this helped to facilitate a good discussion and sharing of ideas amongst the participants. The area around how to present risks created so many ideas that i need to summarize them later on in a different post.

Bottom Line

I perception is that the concept of a boutique conference style focused on niche topics really works. You find your audience (Gavin Halling for example is selling a risk management tool and he cant get a better audience than this for selling it), you find your peers to talk about issues and getting ideas how to resolve them, you build your network to be able to be more successful in your role and depending on the topics and speakers you might get great content and knowledge you can walk away with. The only downside is, that the conference has a price which some might not be willing to or even cant afford. Thats why we havent seen many people out of IT and other industries beside Construction, Engineering and Government. So here is my advice, if you have your Company paying for it -> GO, if you do not or you cant afford it your self -> PRESENT as you are able to get to the conference for free.

Just another couple of hours and i am off to the IQPC Project Risk Management Conference at Southbank in Brisbane. that i was referring to earlier already. My duties during the conference includes chairing the conference, facilitating the interactive discussions, the keynote about “The critical value of Risk Management”, a presentation about “Effective Health Checks” and facilitating a workshop together with Molli Ong on Thursday. So tomorrow i will attend the so called Master Class about “The A-Z of Project Risk Management” to get my mind in the space of where it needs to be for the next 4 days.

So what will happen over the next 4 days:

Day 1, Monday: Masterclass ”The A-Z of Project Risk Management”

According to the program, Kathleen Kuryl, a Programme Manager at the Tasmanian Department of Premier and Cabinet will talk about that the concept of managing risk within project delivery is not new in the project management field. However, it is still broadly misunderstood or ineffectively managed. We as participants will explore innovative ways to implement and/or improve your risk management frameworks in order to achieve optimum project performance.

And the bullet points sound pretty interesting and i will blog tomorrow evening about this and let you know what i got out of this.

Day 2 and 3, Tuesday - Wednesday: “The conference”

Beside speakers out of the Government and private environment that all sound very senior some good talks are on the agenda about

• how to apply the right project structure to manage your risks accordingly
• how to identify an analys your risk upfront
• the effective contigency planning and idenitify the right strategy
• strategies for effective risk governance and ongoing risk control
• turning risks into opportunities
• The correct budget forecasting
• analysing the complexity of effective stakeholder management
• managing expectations
• managing contractual relationships to optimise your risk strategy

and two interactive Discussion about

• Budget forecasting
• the role of software packages managing risks 

Day 4, Thursday “The Workshops”

Two workshops are lined up for Thursday, the first one is “How to Identify, Measure and Manage Risk Throughout the Life Cycle of the Project” talking about that risk management is a process that should last as long as the project to which it is applied. During this workshop, the participants will be able to find out how to effectively manage risk and learn how various risks affect each other throughout your whole project life cycle. And the second is called “How to Engage and Manage Stakeholders to Ensure Successful Project Delivery” talking about that successful project delivery is often dependent on the contribution of others, be it an internal or external contribution. In accordance, risk management within project delivery also requires the active involvement of various stakeholders to be successful. In this workshop, learn to develop your stakeholder management skills as a strategy for ensuring optimal management of risk throughout the life of your project. 

Bottom Line it looks like a very good 4 days with lots of opportunities to learn. How ever, i am really looking into to understand the concept and value of IQPC hosted and organised “Conferences”. Two reasons why.

1. The number of audiences doesnt really justify the term “Conference” as we expect 60 people for this one
2. How speakers are selected and quality checked before presenting
3. How the program has been compiled and changed in the last couple of days

I will talk more about this after the conference once i have a better understanding and talked to some participants and the organizer.