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Risk Up Front: Managing Projects in a Complex World
The ability to relentlessly identify and mitigate risk--that is the key to high-performance project teams. Successful projects depend more on your team's behavior than on their project tools. This book focuses on the simple structures and practices, applied with rigor. These are the tools you need to avoid the late changes that kill project schedules. Underlying all of them are four accountability, transparency, integrity and commitment. Risk Up Front is designed to turn these principles into practice. Murphy's Law tells us, "If anything can go wrong, it will." With Risk Up Front, even risks hiding in your team's blind spot can be discovered and handled, before Murphy has a chance.
- GenresBusinessNonfiction
380 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 13, 2018
185 people are currently reading
201 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 7, 2022
Hooter: Spinning project management across another axis - that of pushing risk up front.
Was introduced to the book part of a workshop by Adam and I'll skip colouring the book review from my experience with the workshop and the author but focus purely on the book. Using research and their own combined experiences across decades of consultancy, the risk up front framework does have some interesting and feasible approaches to project management through concepts like "the cost of being late" being articulated, creating a culture of raising risks and decoupling from solving for them or not having solved them part of the raising. In a way, the gamification (tangential term I know ) of raising risks creates a collaborative cross functional team culture that allows for teams to cover all their bases or be aware of it. I can imagine King Arthur's round table using this concept but we'll stick to modern age technology projects for this conversation. Love how humans are categorised as "optimistic procrastinators" and I thought I was unique. Whilst the book can get a bit dry for general reading, getting a sense of all the concepts shared across another axis of project management get you rethinking on the fundamentals and open up new avenues on how you work towards ensuring successful projects so suggest it as reading material in the arsenal of successful project managers kits.
Was introduced to the book part of a workshop by Adam and I'll skip colouring the book review from my experience with the workshop and the author but focus purely on the book. Using research and their own combined experiences across decades of consultancy, the risk up front framework does have some interesting and feasible approaches to project management through concepts like "the cost of being late" being articulated, creating a culture of raising risks and decoupling from solving for them or not having solved them part of the raising. In a way, the gamification (tangential term I know ) of raising risks creates a collaborative cross functional team culture that allows for teams to cover all their bases or be aware of it. I can imagine King Arthur's round table using this concept but we'll stick to modern age technology projects for this conversation. Love how humans are categorised as "optimistic procrastinators" and I thought I was unique. Whilst the book can get a bit dry for general reading, getting a sense of all the concepts shared across another axis of project management get you rethinking on the fundamentals and open up new avenues on how you work towards ensuring successful projects so suggest it as reading material in the arsenal of successful project managers kits.
April 20, 2020
Risk Up Front (RUF) teaches about the tools, practices and culture involved in the early identification and mitigation of risks in projects under four major principles of accountability, transparency, integrity and commitment.
Based on research, the cost of making changes in projects increases over the course of the project lifecycle. This cost can be in terms of time, resources, materials, additional risks, labour, money, loss of customer trust or market delays. Late changes often arise due to delayed urgency and optimistic procrastination. Optimistic procrastination is the tendency to give schedule estimates without fully factoring in potential risks, while a sense of urgency on projects is often linear with time. RUF aims to shift the sense of urgency forward to the initial stages of the project so that risk-related issues could be promptly addressed.
RUF is tailored for diverse industries and depends on 4 levers to drive change in organizations. Here are the levers:
Language - using conversation to drive values
Structures – considers how money and resources are utilized
Practices – includes standard procedures and tools
Metrics – the indicators being measured
Project meetings are of 3 types: ‘issue meetings’, ‘DKDK meetings’ & ‘information meetings’. Issue meetings are used to solve known issues, DKDK meetings (RUF exclusive) are used to brainstorm and reveal blind spots and informational meetings are just to keep stakeholders abreast of the latest happenings. DKDK (Don’t Know You Don’t Know) meetings include 'weekly accountability meetings' and 'definition meetings'. They are critical to revealing issues and NOT solving them on the spot. Assigned action items will be used to address the problems.
RUF projects are based on 4 simple documents viz.:
1. The project statement
2. The team list with individual accountabilities
3. The weekly schedule
4. The risk action plan
The RUF project statement is a document that captures the why, what, and when of the project. It’s typically kept short, within 3 pages, so it can be read in definition meetings. It’s a document that is not written by one person but complied and reviewed by the entire team.
The RUF team list comprises the names of people who have accountabilities on the project, with their role and contact information. This document also includes a page per team member describing personnel accountabilities called the ‘individual accountabilities document’.
RUF has a special way of approaching scheduling. The RUF weekly schedule contains a reframed version for the entire project schedule divided into weekly deliverables. These weekly deliverables are from a variety of sources including meetings and track activities.
The RUF risk action plan details the cause, effect and impact of risks as it affects the project for the purpose of risk tracking and mitigation.
Based on research, the cost of making changes in projects increases over the course of the project lifecycle. This cost can be in terms of time, resources, materials, additional risks, labour, money, loss of customer trust or market delays. Late changes often arise due to delayed urgency and optimistic procrastination. Optimistic procrastination is the tendency to give schedule estimates without fully factoring in potential risks, while a sense of urgency on projects is often linear with time. RUF aims to shift the sense of urgency forward to the initial stages of the project so that risk-related issues could be promptly addressed.
RUF is tailored for diverse industries and depends on 4 levers to drive change in organizations. Here are the levers:
Language - using conversation to drive values
Structures – considers how money and resources are utilized
Practices – includes standard procedures and tools
Metrics – the indicators being measured
Project meetings are of 3 types: ‘issue meetings’, ‘DKDK meetings’ & ‘information meetings’. Issue meetings are used to solve known issues, DKDK meetings (RUF exclusive) are used to brainstorm and reveal blind spots and informational meetings are just to keep stakeholders abreast of the latest happenings. DKDK (Don’t Know You Don’t Know) meetings include 'weekly accountability meetings' and 'definition meetings'. They are critical to revealing issues and NOT solving them on the spot. Assigned action items will be used to address the problems.
RUF projects are based on 4 simple documents viz.:
1. The project statement
2. The team list with individual accountabilities
3. The weekly schedule
4. The risk action plan
The RUF project statement is a document that captures the why, what, and when of the project. It’s typically kept short, within 3 pages, so it can be read in definition meetings. It’s a document that is not written by one person but complied and reviewed by the entire team.
The RUF team list comprises the names of people who have accountabilities on the project, with their role and contact information. This document also includes a page per team member describing personnel accountabilities called the ‘individual accountabilities document’.
RUF has a special way of approaching scheduling. The RUF weekly schedule contains a reframed version for the entire project schedule divided into weekly deliverables. These weekly deliverables are from a variety of sources including meetings and track activities.
The RUF risk action plan details the cause, effect and impact of risks as it affects the project for the purpose of risk tracking and mitigation.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 6, 2023
Very few books are related to project risk. The book advocates reengineering how tech programs are run, to focus on identifying and addressing risk first until the entire cross functional team is confident and can "commit" to a schedule.
What I found really interesting in this book:
* not committing to the project or the schedule until 25-30 % of early identified risks have been retired
* prioritizing risk by teams familiarity with the problem versus other more standard priorization schemes that focus on severity and impact. The author's experience says the worst risks for projects were risks when introducing something new to the world, followed by the risks that were new to the team.
*Formal risk identification meetings, helping teams find risks that that they don't know, they don't know
*The "language" used for discussing risks
*trading off on the 5W's versus the normal scope, cost and resources:
Why: What opportunity? For Whom?
What: What are we going to create to exploit this market?
Who: Who is going to get it done, who is on the project team - do we need to spend more money
or add skills?
When: When will it be done? What would change to get it done earlier? What would change if
we had more time?
Why Not: What risks are we taking on? What will be hard? What tradeoffs could we make to
remove risk.
Anyone who is leading a project with a high risk profile will find this book of interest.
What I found really interesting in this book:
* not committing to the project or the schedule until 25-30 % of early identified risks have been retired
* prioritizing risk by teams familiarity with the problem versus other more standard priorization schemes that focus on severity and impact. The author's experience says the worst risks for projects were risks when introducing something new to the world, followed by the risks that were new to the team.
*Formal risk identification meetings, helping teams find risks that that they don't know, they don't know
*The "language" used for discussing risks
*trading off on the 5W's versus the normal scope, cost and resources:
Why: What opportunity? For Whom?
What: What are we going to create to exploit this market?
Who: Who is going to get it done, who is on the project team - do we need to spend more money
or add skills?
When: When will it be done? What would change to get it done earlier? What would change if
we had more time?
Why Not: What risks are we taking on? What will be hard? What tradeoffs could we make to
remove risk.
Anyone who is leading a project with a high risk profile will find this book of interest.
May 8, 2021
The authors have made their writing and sharing of various scenarios highly accessible and very easy to follow. The examples offered cover a wide range of fields, but I still found I could quickly pull ideas and plug them into my own small scale projects. Seeing how even the biggest companies can still need help getting out of their own way makes for a fun read and also gives hope for folks just getting started.
May 14, 2024
practical and thorough
This book is the next step from the Agile Manifesto in my mind's edge of the manifesto. It goes into a lot more rea-world examples and applications and making sure that projects are set up to succeed.
This book is the next step from the Agile Manifesto in my mind's edge of the manifesto. It goes into a lot more rea-world examples and applications and making sure that projects are set up to succeed.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews