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Classical project risk management

12/29/2018

 
I've spent some time recently going over the PMBOK Sixth Guide, Sixth Edition PMP training materials created and published by Velociteach. At the same time, I'm using Mike Bissonette's book Project Risk Management: A Practical Implementation Approach to gain a deeper understanding of risk management. How can the PMBOK processes, including the tools, be leveraged to improve on project risk management?
The current PMBOK Guide, Sixth Edition, has this Risk Management process structure:
Planning
  • Plan Risk Management
    Bissonette: "It is considered good practice...to conduct project risk management processes intentionally for projects that are inherently risky." Earlier the this book/guide, the author describes the increasing risks when projects are planned and executed in increasingly competitive industries and spaces. 
  • Identify Risks
    Bissonette:  "Identifying project risks is considered by many to be the most difficult aspect of the project risk management process." The author then devotes three chapters of his book to this process. 
  • Perform Qualitative Risk Analysis
    Here, the author makes the distinction between "individually identified risks" (relevant to this process) and "overall project costs and schedule risks" (relevant to the quantitative risk analysis process). 
  • Perform Quantitative Risk Analysis
    Again, Bissonette, on why this separate process exists: "In most circumstances, the overall project cost and schedule risk assessment cannot be effectively determined by aggregating the individual risks." 
  • Plan Risk Responses
    Here, responses are developed for the identified and analyzed risks. Bisonette notes: "Each response typically requires resources (time, people, and budget) to implement. If too few resources are available to cover all response strategies, priorities and trade-off decisions are necessary...."

Executing
  • ​Implement Risk Responses*
    Velociteach's Andy Crowe provides an introduction to this new Sixth Edition process, which is in the Executing process group. This process implements the plans outlined in the five planning processes for this knowledge area.  It's performed after the planning processes, including Plan Risk Responses, are completed. 
Monitoring and Controlling
  • Monitor Risks
    Bissonette puts this process in the context of the other PMBOK Monitoring and Controlling processes across the knowledge areas (that is, the similarities between Monitor Risks and other Monitoring and Controlling processes). He then describes drivers between planned and actual risks, including the emergence of unknown unknowns. 
* Process introduced in PMBOK Guide, Sixth Edition; not addressed as a process by Bissonette. 

Library Services Platform as a foundation for project management proficiency

12/18/2018

 
Earlier today, I submitted an Ex Libris Users of North America (ELUNA) presentation proposal on the subject of project management. I hope to follow an excellent ELUNA 2018 presentation on project management approaches by SUNY's Jan Waterhouse. 

Earlier this fall, I published a post on the Library Services Platform (LSP) in this space. I'm building on these ideas with this take:
  • LSPs are central to academic library service delivery
  • The implementation or migration project, moving from an Integrated Library System (ILS) to an LSP is an important opportunity for a library or consortium to improve project management proficiency
    • Which is essential, given the opportunities offered by the LSP [or, platform]
In my experience in multiple venues (consortium, user group, single institutions), this line of thinking isn't fully understood because the first point is not understood. If the LSP is simply a slightly-updated ILS software package (the most frequent perception), then the idea of using the toolset to radically enhance user services for electronic, print, and digital content isn't compelling. Additionally, the core value of tightly linking resource management with knowledge bases is often discounted. In this view, the LSP simply fits into a highly fragmented environment just as the ILS, link resolver, knowledge base, and other tools supported library operations 10-15 years ago. 

This is where strategic vision and mature project management skills support tool exploitation. For the latter, the implementation (supported directly by a vendor) and follow-up projects can lay the groundwork for the ongoing enhancement of user services with the LSP as the foundation. 

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