This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Thursday, December 18, 2003
Project Portfolio Management - Assessing Risk -- Most of my writings about project risk management have been related to assessing risks for making promises during the planning and execution of individual projects. While such discussions of uncertainty can be relatively focused and quantitative in these circumstances, there is less to go on when assessing projects for inclusion in a portfolio or pipeline.
One aspect of project portfolio management involves ranking projects for risk. At this stage, without a lot of details or specific numbers, you have to rely more on gut, or on more qualitative assessments. Baseline recently passed along a 10-question quiz that looks helpful for putting an initiative in perspective -- a perspective consisting of a scale of risk characteristics from a Sloan Management Review article that ranges from "variation" through "foreseen" and "unforeseen uncertainty" on to "chaos."
My favorite question in the quiz is about whether...
This project will make or break the career of the executive who's sponsoring it.
A nice dose of realism. Taken with appropriate grains of salt, such an instrument can be useful in discussions of risk in the portfolio planning process.
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