(upbeat music)
- Risk is essentially anything that could go wrong
and in the corporate space,
we do risk planning to really make sure
that we stay out in front of
any possible barrier to the successful delivery
of the project,
so it could be having resources
that aren't made available when we need them
to do certain activities,
it could be a contractor who doesn't
deliver a piece of the project on time,
and, you know, the key to our risk planning
is making sure that, as a project manager,
you're asking those questions and
looking for those things so that you are
identifying them early and
have the time to do the planning around
mitigation plans that could either
head off the risk before it comes to fruition
or, if it does happen, that you have
a contingency plan that you can implement
to keep the project moving forward.
- That's certainly, risks are a significant situation
we all look at, which you know,
we're talking a little bit about threats
and you have those, you have the threat
which is a negative probability,
you know, something negative happening,
but also the opportunities
which are not often sometimes,
but if you can find one, you need to export it of course.
My experience dealing in defense contracting,
in that industry, we had great risk
because our product, the products that
I was responsible for, must meet certain little specs,
and they were very tight tolerances,
and extremely significant layers of testing.
I mean, you know, multiple hours,
various chambers, various atmospheres
that they had experienced.
So great risk involved in some of the sub-components
that you would get from a sub-tier supplier,
that they have to meet those specs,
and if they did not meet the proper specs,
then I had a risk because I get false readings
on tests, etc.
Also one of the biggest challenges that I've faced,
I had five sole source sub-tier suppliers
because of the proprietary ownership of that component,
and each of the shortest lead time I had
on any of those suppliers was 20 weeks.
So you see the risk there to schedule.
If they're behind, if for anything,
so I had to develop a major risk register,
which I tracked, and also you would
basically have categorized all your risks,
which are the greatest catastrophic type of situation
you can develop risk responses to that.
And you have others which were lower risk,
you put like on a watch list.
You know, if this happens, it may delay a week.
But if this happens, it could shut the program down.
So you gotta be aware of all those,
and you have to manage those risks.
And the last thing I'd say is risk management is iterative.
You know, it's a cycle that never stops,
cause there'll be risks once you develop a risk response
and you implement that, and then you determine
the success of that response,
sometimes you have second and third order affects
to that response that create other risks,
or maybe opportunities, you don't know.
(laughter)
But and the quality aspect was some of the greatest
risks I faced.