2.1 Planning

Well folks, welcome back for session two of Introduction to Project Management Principles and Practices from the University of California Irvine. We’re gonna talk about planning. In the first session we talked about there are five process groups. Planning is the second, process group we’re going to discuss. We’ve figured out what the project is, then looks like this. And we’ll put a plan together to figure out, well, how do we make that happen? And talk about some of the key tools and concepts in this. One of them, we’re gonna talk about risks. We have to look at risks to figure out what could go wrong with the project, because sometimes the risks in the project will actually determine some of the tasks we have to put into the project. There are just going to be some risks. You’re not gonna get away from them. Risks, every project’s going to have them. The idea is to know about the bad ones up front. There’s some of them that, if a, if one of these risks hits the project. They’re so small, it just doesn’t make any difference. But some of them, they’re bad. If these things happen, you need to be ready for them. Let’s say your going to drill for some oil down in the, bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. And you take a look at that and say well, we’ve got that, that pipe that’s gonna be down there pumping oil out. We’ll have some kind of a hose that comes up to a platform that sits up on top of the water. Gee, could anything go wrong with that? We want to look at that and say, yeah, there’s some things that could happen, and we better be ready for those risks if they actually do happen to the project. What are the worst ones? And let’s be ready for those. There are a number of different ways to analyze risks, just find one that you like and use it. Use at least oe of these things. What is a risk? A risk is one of those uncertain things that may happen. If you know that in three months down the road in your project, there’s some new law or some new regulation that’s going to come into place. It’s going to be inacted maybe January 1st or July 1st, and at that point, your project just has to deal with that, that’s not a risk. That’s going to happen, it’s there, you have to plan for it, it’s just a barrier to your project. It’s just part of the project from the very beginning, you have to take care of it. Risks are the things that may or may not happen. These are things that might just jump up and surprise us once in a while. Surprise, happened. Or, maybe it didn’t happen. So, things that may or may not happen. Also, the Project Management Institute, PMI, talks about positive and negative risks. We’re going to focus on negative risks. Positive risks, those are the things that we try and figure out, yeah, that was great. How do we get that to happen again? [INAUDIBLE] just enhance those. Make those available somehow to happen again. We want to try and find out how to do that. It’s just kind of like blind luck. Take it and run. Be happy with it. Negative risk, those are the ones we’re gonna talk about, working with here. There are four steps in this. A lot of times, people talk about risk analysis or they talk about risk management. It’s all part of the same thing. We have to do something with risks. We have to find the risks. So any way you can find them is fair. Ways to find them, you have the right people sitting around that project table with you on your project team. Those people have a whole lot of expertise about this project, so they should be able, able to help you really analyze what, list what some of the risks are going to be all about. Also we can look at industry information we can look at other organizations. We can look at other projects in our organization that have been similar to this. Just find the risks wherever you can and list those. Then after you figure out the list of risks, analyze them. Some of them, we’ll find, these are bad enough, we need to worry about them, and others, we don’t need to worry about these. They’re not such a big deal. The ones that are bad, that we need to really worry about, we need to develop some kind of a risk plan for that, so that if the bad thing happens, we’re ready to step in and take care of it immediately. And when the bad thing happens, do that step in and take care of it. Mitigation is one of the ways to deal with these risks. Mitigation is one of the way to do it. Transfer the risk to somebody else through a contract. Avoid the risk by just doing something different in the project is another way to do this. Mitigate the risk is the way to do this. We’re gonna talk about two elements when we analyse this risk. One will be impact. How bad is it if it happens? How much will it actually affect the project? And we’re going to talk about probability. Is there any likelihood that this could actually occur on the project? What’s gonna happen and will this cause failure on the project? When we look at impact, how bad is it if it happens on the project? Let’s say, we have an agricultural development project we’re working with here. So we planted a little garden plot, we’ve rented our little garden plot from the city for $10 a year. There’s a bunch of other garden plots around here too. Huge agricultural area, everybody’s got their little gardens here. It’s just about time to harvest all of this food that we’ve planted, everything’s getting ready at the same time. We’ve all decided, hey, we’re gonna go down Saturday morning, we’re all gonna have this big harvest day, and go down and get everything out of these gardens that we have down there. Well, the night before we’re ready to go do that, all of a sudden, boom. Two elephants come out of nowhere and just stomp all over our little garden plot here, roll all over the place, wreck everything. Well if you’re in the city that’s not gonna happen in very many parts of the world. Is it bad if it happens? Sure, but is it likely to occur? Probably not. We want to look at probability, looking at this in the city, probably not gonna happen, looking at this in some village in Northern India, out in the forest. Well, maybe we could have some elephants that come out of there. That actually did happen to a little village in that area about three and a half years ago. A couple of rogue elephants came out of the forest, and stomped all over a grain crop that this village had planted that was going to account for about 40% of the food supply for this, this village for the next year. So is it bad if this gets all stomped to pieces? Yes. Is it likely that it can happen is there any, any chance that it could happen? What’s the probability? Yeah, there’s a chance this could happen. It actually did. Now, there’s another element to look at, triggers. Can we tell when something’s going to happen? When we see it coming at the project. The triggers are the things that tell us if something is coming toward the project, or has it actually hit the project and it’s already affecting the project. We know when the elephants are in there, we’d like to be able to predict it ahead of time. This trigger piece is a way that helps us figure how we’re going to put a risk management plan into our project. Couple of different ways to do things. If we can predict ahead of time, these triggers are here and let us see things well ahead of time. So if we can figure out some way to predict the elephants coming through, like put some strings with some bells on them out in the forest or something, and we hear these bells ringing as the elephants come breaking through there. Someway to predict ahead of time. Then what we can do is have a way to deal with this, which might be everybody in the village has some sort of a, a, task now. Different noise makers that people have. So, we go out and bang on things. Make all kinds of noise. Different people have torches that they’re gonna light and wave around. Something to wave these elephants off and get them moving somewhere away from our pro, or crop here. If there’s no way to really predict when the elephants are gonna come charging out of the forest and run over toward our crops here, we might just have to build an elephant-proof fence around this thing. So, those are just in case kinds of risk management. We build the elephant proof fence if the elephants never even show up. It’s in the project, it’s part of the project, it’s some of the tasks, it’s the materials we have to deal with, it’s in the scope of the project. It’s just done if the elephants show up or not. The other one, we only implement the risk plan. Run out and make all the noise, chase the elephants away. If we can prove that, predict ahead of time. So these triggers are a good way to help us figure out how we’re going to implement our risk management plans, and what kind of risk management plan will be effected. Make decisions based on risk priorities. Determine which risks are going to be the ones that we have to deal with. Determine which ones we need counter measures for, take care of along the way. And we’re going to plan our actions based on our risk management analysis that we’ve put together. I’m gonna show you a form here, that comes from an organization. This is one that they have. And, there’s is a lot prettier than this. I just wanted to get the major fields on here so we could discus these. They have the risk listed, then they have the impact probability and they’re gonna rate these things 1 through 5. So 1, it’s negligible. And 5, that’s a big deal. Critical failure for the project, or yes, it will definitely occur along the way here. The highest rating we can have for these risks is 25. We say that’s a bad risk and we want to lower those things down. Every organization needs to figure out how risk adverse they are, and what that number needs to be brought down to so that we say, okay, this is an acceptable risk. After we figure out now what we’re gonna do about this, this risk, then once our new impact number, our new probability number and our new total have we come up with something that will lower this risk down enough so it’s acceptable to the organization, and we can move ahead with the project. We also need then to list our triggers. Now the way that this works, impact and probability are multiplied together. So to get our total number, it’s the number 1 through 5, and their impact one, number 1 through 5 under probability. We multiply those and come up with a number. You’ll notice that triggers are not on here. Triggers are going to be a list that will accompany this chart. And the triggers will be the whole list of things that tells us when the, when the risk is coming toward the project, or when the risk has already hit the project and is already affecting it. So I’m gonna have two, two pieces that go together here. This chart and a list of triggers. Project tasks. It all comes down to individual project tasks. The project plan is a way to lay out the tasks. For our project, we’re gonna figure out times and we’re gonna figure out resources to go along with these tasks as well.