MGMT 610 Week 2 DB Forum 1 Example

Discussion Board Forum 1: Thread and Two Replies

MGMT 610 Risk Management, Discussion Board Forum 1 (thread and two replies)

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt, the renovation and the classmates' posts are composites standing in for the course's own forum; the textbooks, the peer-reviewed studies and Scripture are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for MGMT 610.

Thread

Three weeks into our ten-week summer renovation of a 1968 residence hall, a flooring crew lifted the first tiles on the third floor, and the industrial hygienist's sample came back positive for asbestos in the black mastic underneath. Abatement stopped work on two floors for nineteen days, the project finished eleven days after students moved in, and the university paid for temporary housing for 64 residents. The frustrating part is that nobody was surprised. The architect, the contractor's superintendent and I, the university's project manager, had all said at one time or another that the mastic in a building that age was probably asbestos. The risk was never written into the register, and no sample was taken before the schedule was set.

Kutsch and Hall (2010) offer a name for this: deliberate ignorance. Studying information technology project managers, they found that managers sometimes chose not to identify or analyze risks, treating some as irrelevant, some as too uncomfortable to raise and some as impossible to resolve, often because stakeholders preferred not to hear about them. Our team fits the pattern. A positive test before the project would have forced a longer schedule that the housing office had already rejected, so no one asked for one. We were not careless; we were avoiding an answer we did not want. In hindsight, I can name the moment. At the design kickoff, the superintendent asked whether we wanted the floors sampled, and I said we would deal with it if it came up, because the housing office had already announced the move-in date to students and parents.

The research also suggests that formal practices are used less than they should be. Raz et al. (2002), studying over 100 projects in Israel, reported that few of those projects used formal risk tools at all, that the tools appeared more often in projects with higher uncertainty, and that projects using them tended to succeed more often, especially in meeting schedule and budget goals. Our renovation was treated as routine, so it received routine attention. Pooling the empirical work on software and systems projects, De Bakker et al. (2010) found limited evidence that risk management directly causes success and suggested that much of its value lies in communication, in making risks visible and discussable. That is what our project lacked. A risk register entry would not have removed the asbestos, but it would have forced a conversation about testing in March instead of a crisis in June.

The PMBOK Guide lists identification techniques such as reviewing documents, using expert judgment and checklists drawn from past projects (Project Management Institute, 2017). Any of those would have caught our mastic: the 1968 drawings, the hygienist's experience and the university's own records of abatement in two sister buildings all pointed to it. Wilson (2015) presents risk planning as the first stage of controlling unexpected problems in a project, which assumes that teams are willing to look.

Jesus pictured a man planning a tower who first tallies the expense to see whether his money will cover the whole building, since a half-built foundation leaves its owner a joke to the neighbors (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Luke 14:28-30). Counting the cost includes counting the costs you would rather not know about. For our next renovation, the university now requires sampling of suspect materials before the schedule is approved.

Classmates: what risk on your projects did everyone suspect but no one wrote down?

Reply to Teresa

Teresa, your thread on the clinic's billing system upgrade described a risk register with 140 entries that no one read after the kickoff meeting. You concluded that the template was too complicated and proposed a simpler one.

A simpler template may help, but I wonder whether the register's size was a symptom rather than the cause. De Bakker et al. (2010) suggest that much of risk management's value comes from communication, from making risks a regular topic among the people who can act on them. A register reviewed by no one does not communicate, however well designed. The PMBOK Guide describes monitoring risks as an ongoing process, with risk reviews held throughout the project (Project Management Institute, 2017). If your team had spent ten minutes of each weekly meeting on the top five entries, the 140-entry register might have been less of a problem.

The apostle Paul told the Ephesians to look carefully at how they walk, making the best use of the time (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Ephesians 5:15-16). A short weekly review is a small use of time that keeps attention where it belongs, and it gives the people closest to the work a regular chance to say that a risk has changed.

Who owned the register on your project, and did that person have time in each meeting to raise it?

Reply to Malik

Malik, your account of the trucking company's warehouse automation project was a good example of a team that took risk seriously, with weekly reviews and a dedicated risk manager, and still missed the conveyor vendor's financial trouble until the vendor filed for bankruptcy.

Raz et al. (2002) found that risk practices were used more in projects with higher technological uncertainty, which makes sense for an automation project like yours. Yet your team's risk reviews seem to have focused on technical risks, such as integration and software, rather than commercial ones like supplier health. Wilson (2015) treats procurement as part of the risk picture, which suggests that a vendor's finances belong in the register alongside the technology. A simple annual check of a key supplier's credit rating or financial statements might have flagged the problem months before the filing. Even a question at each quarterly vendor meeting about staffing and backlog can reveal strain early.

Your team's discipline is a real strength; the gap may simply be in where it looked. Commercial risks tend to sit outside the project team's daily view, in contracts and accounts payable, so they need someone assigned to watch them. Paul's instruction that each person should test his own work (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Galatians 6:4) applies to the team's own register too.

Did the contract with the conveyor vendor include any requirement to report financial changes?

References

de Bakker, K., Boonstra, A., & Wortmann, H. (2010). Does risk management contribute to IT project success? A meta-analysis of empirical evidence. International Journal of Project Management, 28(5), 493-503. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2009.07.002

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Kutsch, E., & Hall, M. (2010). Deliberate ignorance in project risk management. International Journal of Project Management, 28(3), 245-255. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2009.05.003

Project Management Institute. (2017). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK guide) (6th ed.).

Raz, T., Shenhar, A. J., & Dvir, D. (2002). Risk management, project success, and technological uncertainty. R&D Management, 32(2), 101-109. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9310.00243

Wilson, R. (2015). Mastering risk and procurement in project management: A guide to planning, controlling, and resolving unexpected problems. Pearson FT Press.