Calendars

Are You Managing Risk? You Should Be.

Posted on July 20, 2019March 17, 2021 by Jigs Gaton

Are You Managing Risk? You Should Be.

Risk management is a fundamental part of any project management regimen, and if you are not following a process for managing any potential risks you may encounter along the way, you are in serious risk yourself; as risk not mitigated during the rollout of a project is a primary cause of project failure today.

But what is “risk” in the first place?

Simply put, risk is any uncertain event, task or condition that impacts at least one of the project’s objectives as it occurs.

Fortunately for planners, there is a well-documented protocol for incorporating risk taking (and risk management) into your daily project-management routine. This article covers a basic risk management protocol, provides templates to follow that protocol, and then describes how you can use Project Plan 365 to help you mitigate risks along the way. While Risk Management is a well-documented discipline in itself, by following a simple procedure and creating a document or two, anyone can successfully prepare for and mitigate risks as they present themselves…

Risk Management Basics

First, the process of risk management for any project goes like this:

Plan for any potential risks you may encounter during the life of your project (create a Risk Management plan, specific to the project on hand). A downloadable template is provided here to get you started.
Layout a process for risk identification, analysis, response, monitoring and reporting within the newly created plan. In addition, any contingency plans for the identified risks should be documented here, along with those responsible for carrying out the prepared mitigations (command & control).
Develop a risk register to identify risks, where you rate the likelihood that the risky situation will occur, the seriousness of each risky situation, and the impact on the project if that risk were to go unchecked. A downloadable template is provided here to help you out.
Maintain a risk log, documenting any interventions and follow-ups as needed.
In your planning software, identify risky tasks and review them periodically as your project is rolled out. Also, update your project plan based on any risk mitigations performed, or new risks encountered.

Now, for those using Project Plan 365, the following tutorial will get you started recording and displaying risk within your plan.

Note to Microsoft Project Users:
If you are a Microsoft Project user, you can use this procedure as well, but you must first use Project Plan 365 to set things up within your .MPP file. Then, when you open up your project file in MS Project, you should see any identified risk as described below (just add a column containing Outline Code7 and rename the column to Risk).

Identifying Risky Tasks within Project Plan 365

Project Plan 365 offers a simple yet effective way of tracking and managing the risks you have identified in your Risk Register (from your Risk Management Plan). Just follow these steps to get started:

1 ) To turn on the Risk Management feature within Project Plan 365; just go to Backstage | Options | Risk Management and click the Enable Risk Management System checkbox, and then tap OK.

2 ) Once the Risk Management System is enabled, switch your plan to the Risk View, where you can identify any risky tasks in your plan by changing values in stored in the Risk column: *

The Risk View is handy, as this view allows you to go through your entire plan to quickly “tag” tasks with a risk value, and then this view will automatically sort all tasks by the value selected (in this case: low, medium, high or No Value).

3 ) You can also add your Risk column to any view you desire, for example, to the Gantt Chart View:

4 ) Using the Risk column (by clicking the twisty), you can filter out the values you don’t want to see. In this example, we are filtering on just the high values. Once filtered, the view will only show tasks with a high-risk value:

In addition to filtering risky tasks to display just what you want, you can also customize the default risk labels to display anything you want, such as labels used in your Risk Management Register, Logs, or Plan. Just edit the Risk Level grid found under Options to suit your requirements:

Risk Reporting Within Project Plan 365

Once Risk values are added to tasks, a Risk Report can be generated by navigating to the Report ribbon and selecting one of the available reports:

Summing Up...

By synchronizing a Risk Management Plan right alongside your project plan, you can track risky tasks within your schedule, and stay on top of any activity that may go wrong during the course of your project rollout. In addition, you can produce Risk Reports or otherwise use your project schedule to control and mitigate risks as they materialize, all according to plan.

To start managing project risk today, subscribe to the Project Plan 365 Business Plan without delay!

Risk Management the easy way - subscribe to Project Plan 365 today!

For more information about Risk Management within Project Plan 365, see this help page.

Simple Calendaring in Project Plan 356

Posted on March 31, 2019April 6, 2020 by Jigs Gaton

Simple Calendaring in Project Plan 356

When scheduling a project in either Microsoft Project or Project Plan 365, you can change the calendar for your project, i.e. the days your work is ongoing – or not! In fact, you can tailor calendars in many ways, for example, you can have unique calendars for people (resources), for tasks and for the project as a whole. Having all these custom calendaring options is great, but can be a bit complex and confusing to set up (see here).

What if all you need to do is change the days of the week everyone is working, for example if your project locale is somewhere Friday & Saturday is considered weekend time off (or, if you are lucky enough to just work 4 days a week instead of 5)? In these simple cases, the latest version of Project Plan 365 provides a much easier way to change your project calendar.

And what if you just want to extend the default work week (M-F) by one day, perhaps to finish up some work left over from Friday, using Saturday to get that done. Here too, Project Plan 365 provides a quick way to change the project calendar to reflect that one extra day of work.

Case 1 – Changing the Default Work Week

In the case where all want to do is adjust the work days within a week, for example, to indicate your project is being rolled out Sunday through Thursday, instead of the usual Monday through Friday, then just follow these steps:

1 ) Open Project Plan 365 and go to the File menu to select Options:

2 ) In the Options dialog, go to the Schedule tab and check or uncheck the desired-working days from the Default working days group:

In the example above, we’ve changed the default work week, and have also updated the default project calendar all in one go.

3 ) Click OK.

Case 2 – Changing a Single Day

In the case where all want to do is extend or limit your work by a single specific day, for example to finish up some work left over from Friday - on Saturday, then just follow these simple steps:

1 ) Within your plan, open the date-picker from anywhere within in the Start/Finish column and click on any non-working day that you wish to change (in this case, Sat):

2 ) When clicking a non-working day (or a working day for that matter), an Alert message appears, from which you have these three options:

If you selected a non-working day (in this example, Saturday the 7th) and then hit the Make this a working day radio button, clicking OK makes that Saturday a working day.

3 ) Here you can also Adjust the default working days (just as we did in Case 1 above), i.e. if you decide you are working all Saturdays from here on out, you can just select the Saturday checkbox to make that so:

4 ) Click OK, and you’re done.

Summing Up...

For these common cases of calendaring adjustments, you can simply use Options / Schedule to change the default work week, or just click on a Start/Finish date (from any view) to make changes to a particular day. This technique greatly simplifies tailoring your work days to the days you are actually working - or not!

Note: Of course, you can always do all of this the “hard” way (by using the Change Working Time dialog), but the two cases described here do not need such heavy lifting, and this simple method allows Project Plan 365 users to make the most common calendar adjustments in the shortest amount of time. (Sorry Microsoft Project users, this feature is not available to you.)

To start calendaring the easy way, subscribe to Project Plan 365 right away!

The Importance of Resource Calendaring

Posted on September 14, 2017February 27, 2019 by Jigs Gaton

The Importance of Resource Calendaring

With so many projects of late either failing, partially failing or coming in way over budget, those of us in the business of managing projects are concerned, and rightly so.

The reason for project failures and cost bloats are many fold, and this article only covers one problem that falls under the category of resource management - future posts here will cover other reasons, such as problems in task, cost and collaboration management.

While proper calendaring is just one important aspect of resource management, it is often forgotten about amid the furry of rapid project design and implementation.

In our rush to meet project-design deadlines, our up front estimates for human or material resources are often more vague than accurate, and this lack of precision often proves detrimental later on down the project road.

So let's take a look at just how that dynamic works (imprecise calendaring), or in this case, doesn't work to the benefit of project outcomes.

Proper calendaring (or in other words, knowing when your workforce is available for work) is important during all phases of project management, from the initial proposal & budget work-up, to the final analysis conducted once the project is complete.

While your organization may have a standard working calendar (start/end times, company days off, corporate holidays, etc.), it’s important to realize that individuals - and even materials - can have unique calendars that will deviate from the standard one used by your organization, and if not taken into consideration, can skew any plan calculations significantly.

So let's first look at the relationship between a human resource, and their related calendar data points. Figure 1 shows the many related data points for any given human resource.

In addition to these human resource calendar deviations, even materials can be considered to have their own calendar data points - see Figure 2.

Although with specific materials, you usually have them or not, but machines that use material resources can certainly be thought of as having a calendar with data points.

These points of concern (shift-work times, special leaves and holidays, etc.) are all factors that affect the bottom line, in terms of workforce availability, project costs and length of task durations.

One must look at all of these points combined to get a more complete picture of your project's scope.

Implications during the Initial Phase

So when preparing a proposal for any project, instead of picking a number out of a hat (for resource costs) or relying on an enterprises standard 8-hour / 5-day work week, you can use the above data points to get an much better estimate all of these data points are factored in.

One common example of an error during this phase, is when a globalized company uses a standard US calendar for work being performed in Asia, where workers may be using a 10-hour / 6-day workweek - see Figure 3.

But regardless of location, if these often forgotten factors are not considered, you might be proposing a planned budget and schedule that can never be met.

Implications during the Middle Phase

When scheduling the work, unless precise calendaring is used that takes into account all possible calendaring points, planned schedules will most likely be shorter than the actual outcome, and cause your project to have needless cost overruns and delays.

Implications during the Final Phase

When evaluating project performance during the post-mortem, the results will be skewed by the initial errors in calendaring, and that will not be helpful when repurposing previous project data in order to project costs and schedules for the next like-project coming down the road.

In Conclusion…

So, in this post we have 1) explored the importance of calendaring across all phases of project planning, 2) shown how a single resource has many calendar data points, and 3) been given a simple procedure for getting a handle on your project's workforce availability (and how that affects project scope).

The benefit of proper calendaring should become evident in your next project that takes this knowledge into consideration, so give that a try – since as they say - the proof is in the pudding!

Watch this space for future posts that will help ensure that your project is successful, and never placed into the category of "failed" or "partially failed."