How fast can you check your projects for risks?

Projects are healthier if you regularly check for risk. Here is a 10-minute risk-check exercise 

Every project manager knows that it’s essential to check for risks in your projects. Rooting out hidden problems prevents them from turning into project monsters down the road. Doing a risk check can feel like a time consuming, boring chore you would prefer to not do. It’s like going to the gym. You know you are healthier if you do it. It even feels good once you get there.  

This is why some of the most popular workouts are designed to be done in 10 minutes. It’s easier to get around to an easy 10-minute chore than a hard one that takes over an hour.  

So here is a 10-minute workout for your projects. Do it regularly and your projects will be healthier and avoid an emergency health crisis.  

Find over-budget tasks 

Scan your projects for tasks that cost more than you allocated. A huge cost overrun is not something you want to discover at the end of the project. The earlier you catch these, the easier it is to adjust or give your stakeholders a heads-up. Costs that are over budget can be a warning that you have scope creep, too. At the very least, knowing that you underbid a project will prevent you from doing the same thing in the future. Again, the sooner you know about this the better for all your projects.  

Scan for late tasks 

Do a quick, frequent scan for late tasks and you will prevent a myriad of problems. If people are simply not ticking their work off as complete, your attention to this lets them know that someone cares and will notice, which will help them take this housekeeping seriously.  

If tasks are late, that can cause a waterfall of problems, pushing out other work and changing schedules can send your plan into disarray. So, if a task is late, the sooner you know about it, the sooner you can mitigate the future damage it might cause.  

Debug your tasks for missing elements 

If you set your plan up in a rush, you may have omitted important data like task durations, budgeted hours for work, and dependencies. So, your risk check should include a scan for these important pieces.  

Cleaning this up is like debugging your plan. A project plan without dependencies, durations, and work time estimates won’t function, just as software with bugs won’t run correctly.  

If, say, you can’t install the network until the equipment arrives, but the installation is not set up as dependent on that delivery, that work will land on an engineer’s schedule – sending them to the client site to do an installation – before the equipment is on site to install. And without durations and time estimates, you could easily overbook your resources and run over deadline and budget. 

Hunt down tasks without owners 

If you don’t assign someone to do the work, it won’t get done. When setting up a plan, it’s often expedient to create all the tasks and later assign the work to available resources. Make sure you haven’t missed any work assignments. A task without an owner will become a late task in the future. That might leave you scrambling to find someone with the skills to do the work at the last minute or cause you to miss delivery dates. That will derail your day, at some time in the future, and could possibly derail your entire plan.  

Look for task owners who are over capacity 

You assigned a task to someone. Are you sure they are available to do that work? Be proactive about checking that your upcoming tasks are assigned to people who are available, not on vacation, and not also assigned to do another task at the same time. It is always best to know about this before an engineer is hit with an impossible day and you have to fly into panic mode to solve a challenging problem at the last minute that would have been an easy fix last week. 

Missing project management time 

Billing for project management is an important part of a project budget. Even if you charge a fixed amount, you need to know how much time you spend on project management to calculate whether that fixed amount is accurate.  

Get into the habit of whipping through your plan daily to tick off items that are complete, check with stakeholders about work that is due or overdue, and to enter the time you spend on project management.  

For super healthy project plans, Moovila Perfect Project’s risk monitoring and remediation tools (RPAX) automate project health checks, debug plans with AI, and autonomously monitor your projects 24/7 so you never miss a thing.