To Manage Risk properly you need Daily Inhibitor Monitoring
Steven Souther
I train & consult with PMOs to remove chaos, reduce costs, and improve services ROI. Contact me for free consultation & assessment.
I find it interesting that the current PMBOK dedicates 64 pages to risk management, and yet I cannot find the word “inhibitor” anywhere in the entire document. (Note: this is not a derogatory comment about the PMBOK).
It is my experience requiring resources to report inhibitor status on active tasks each working day, is a great source of information for the risk management plan. This information is active work performance data and can be included in work performance reports.
It is important to know if there is anything slowing the progress of a task, and it is better to know sooner than later.
A single task can have multiple inhibitors, and each inhibitor can have a different effect in slowing the progress of the task. Inhibitors accumulate and no single inhibitor is too small to ignore.
When you ask your resource if there is anything slowing their progress, they see that you are paying attention and care about their success. You can demonstrate your commitment to them by making plans to do all you can to eliminate their inhibitors.
When an inhibitor is identified I ask — what is the impact? I express impact in terms of percent; 0% is no impact, 50% is causing the task to take twice as long to finish than planned, and 100% is total impact — that is to say no progress can be made on the task.
On a task-by-task basis I sum all of the current impacts and use the total to identify which tasks are at the greatest risk of finishing late or not finishing at all.
I also ask if there are any potential inhibitors that could happen in the future, and if so, what would be the impact, and when they might occur. This is a great way to provide ongoing input to the risk management plan by identifying potential risks.
I developed these techniques in response to lessons-learned from failed projects. I found that many problematic projects had significant inhibitors that were reported late or not at all.
Billion Dollar Project Leader| Director of Capital Projects | Helping Companies Execute Their CAPEX Goals into Reality
5 年Excellent article!!!
DevSecOps Lead @ Pure Storage, CISO | PMP | CISM
5 年Very insightful article!? Based on my experience, a key to handle these inhibitors/ impediments is team empowerment. A self-organizing, empowered Team will know which impediments they need to address, when to address them, and when they need support from outside the team.
Sr IT Project Manager experienced with Software, Cyber Security and Infrastructure IT Projects. PMP / Lean 6 Sigma Certified, lifetime learner and mentor.
5 年For tight schedules and agile/scrum development Inhibitors play a huge roll. Shared resources, management re-prioritization can side step best made plans? and create havoc with timely delivery. Daily notification of changes to the resources and mitigation's planning would fall heavily in here as well. Interesting view, liked it.
Senior Manager, IT Business Systems at Entrust
5 年Steve, I like the focus on task inhibitors and especially the 0-50-100 scale.? I'm curious - how do you assess and report inhibitor impact on a project summary or dashboard - pareto or other?? While I personally want to see the granularity, I won't necessarily want to report at that level of detail.
VP, Principal Tech Project Manager
5 年Good article Steve! I typically identify Constraints within an overall project which can ultimately become a Risk or Issue. I believe you are attaching Inhibitors directly to specific tasks within the project and ranking by percentage of weight. I am conceptualizing this (if I am correct in thought process) and it can be done with a specialized tool or a spreadsheet but is a good point of daily or weekly team discussions for future Risk and Issue reporting. I can see this becoming a separate reporting factor but also needs to stay attached to project Risks and Issue reporting.