How can you use your team's expertise to manage project risks?

use your leadership skills Good communication and collaborative leadership helps in eliciting information from team members as well as creating a safe environment for the team members. When this is done, it is easy to acquire relevant information on potential risks from your team. The treasures of their expertise is unlocked by creating the right environment.

The biggest takeaway for me in 15yrs is to enable the team in active risk management from day-1. Just telling the team to do it does not help. Here are 3 ways: 1/ Assign 'risk champions' Expert eyes see potential risks that others don't. Map experts in the team to areas where risks can impact the project the most. 2/ Let them collaborate Risks at the edges can be easily detected when expert minds collaborate and analyze interdependencies 3/ Make risk and quality part of everything Just like quality is a mindset, identification & management of risk is a mindset too. Let people question decisions from the perspective of risks. These 3 have resulted in incalculable savings for our projects.

Don't outsource your expertise. The most effective project managers also have some level of technical expertise I the project that they are managing. Accordingly, the project manager should have a base understanding of the types of risks that tend to arise on similar projects.

Encouraging your team to be proactive is a key step in spotting risks effectively. Ask team members to think beyond their usual tasks. Let's say you're planning an advertising campaign – someone in the team might consider how changes in what customers like could affect how well the campaign works. This helps find risks that come from how different parts of the project connect. It's like having a useful guide to make smart choices as the campaign goes on. Moreover, consider getting input from people outside your team, such as customers, suppliers, regulatory authorities, or industry experts, when identifying risks. They see things differently and might notice risks that your team hasn't seen.

By harnessing your team's collective expertise, you can proactively discover, assess, and mitigate possible risks, resulting in more successful project results and improved overall risk management.

These are some great tools, but the questions to team members and SMEs should start really basic: - Where do you see the most likely failure points? - What the worst case scenario for you on this project? - Who else should I be asking about risks? - What are the most common risks you see come to fruition on a project like this? - What am I overlooking? Your team is there to act as subject matter experts and to help identify your blind spots. The tools to organize and analyze risks are nearly useless if you're overlooking potentially large risks.

The risk response analysis can be related to root cause analysis. The fishbone diagram is a great tool for managing the response to the risk according to its root cause, as well as allowing the correct categorizing of the risk according to the restriction, affected area or other factor that the PM deems necessary. It's important involving the other affected areas in the search for a response to the risk. Sometimes the stakeholders are not correctly linked to the resolution of items that are intrinsically related to, as well as their respective areas. Sometimes we restrict these risk approaches to the teams involved in the management and execution of the project and we only communicate the Risk Management Plan to another stakeholders

In my experience setting up regular cadence for risk analysis/planning with your team always helps and setting up expectations for risk mitigation plan with all involved teams establish the value of proactive risk mitigation across the teams. Also documenting the best practices from past risk mitigation experience helps the teams.

Everything today is based on data. We learn from mistakes to avoid them in the future. The same goes for risk management. As leaders, we must help develop critical thinking without letting fear of failure get in the way. Problems (cause and consequences) in previous projects should always be reviewed and brought to the table during the planning of each new project. Many companies are still learning to deal with this and know that, more important than punishing, pointing the blame or complaining, it is crucial to question yourself, talk about it, document relevant facts and map causes. With time and repetition, this becomes necessary and natural to everyone.

Risk and project managers must be aware of biases. Biases influence and impact our evaluations. We cannot avoid them but we can perform the analysis by considering biases impacts. Being aware of biases allows risk managers to ask smart questions and challenge the stakeholders. Quantitative analysis may support this process because they force people to reason about quantitative values and reduce the "feelings” interfering with the evaluation.

All good points on leveraging the power of people and their collective intelligence to spot risks and address them before they steamroll you and your project. One thing I would add is - consistency - We are creatures of habit, things that can be done easily and consistently. On a lot of projects, risk is treated as an activity of irregular frequency and forced necessity. This naturally feels hard and people discontinue focusing on it. Question to consider - what could you as a project manager do to make risk an easy habit for your team members to inculcate?