MGMT 610 Week 7 DB Forum 4 Example

Discussion Board Forum 4: Thread and Two Replies

MGMT 610 Risk Management, Discussion Board Forum 4 (thread and two replies)

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt, the solar project 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

Our company built a 120-megawatt solar farm on former farmland in south Georgia last year, and pile driving was the first major activity: about 42,000 steel piles to carry the racking. The weekly report tracked piles installed against plan. For five straight weeks it read 82, 79, 76, 74 and 71 percent. Each week the site manager explained the shortfall, first rain, then a crew change, then rocky soil on the east blocks, and each week the risk register kept the schedule risk at moderate. In week six, the racking crews arrived to find too few piles to work on, and the project lost twelve days. Because the utility's interconnection date was fixed in the power purchase agreement, those twelve days had to be recovered with overtime and a second racking crew, at a cost of about $310,000.

Williams et al. (2012), studying early warning signs in complex projects, concluded that project professionals are not good at detecting or acting on them, and that formal assessments at gateways catch warnings tied to the project's formal structure while many others are sensed informally. Our warning was not hidden; it was formal and written down. What failed was the response. Each explanation made the shortfall seem temporary, so no one treated the trend as a signal. Nikander and Eloranta (2001) argued that early warnings deserve deliberate management, with practices for noticing and acting on them rather than leaving them to chance, which our project had not done. Looking back, there were informal signs too: the pile crew's foreman had asked twice for a second rig, and the geotechnical report had flagged refusal risk on the east blocks. Each piece of information was known to someone; none was connected to the schedule risk in the register.

Earned value would have made the drift harder to explain away. Anbari (2003) describes how the method integrates scope, cost and schedule, using performance indices to show trends and forecast completion. By week five, our schedule performance index for pile installation was about 0.71, meaning 71 percent of planned work had been done. The PMBOK Guide treats monitoring risks as an ongoing process of tracking identified risks and evaluating whether responses are working (Project Management Institute, 2017). A simple rule, any index below 0.90 for two consecutive weeks triggers a risk review, would have flagged the problem in week two, when a second pile rig could still have been mobilized. Wilson (2015) treats control as the stage that turns a plan into action, and our plan had no rule that converted a number into a decision. A threshold does not replace judgment, but it forces a conversation at the moment judgment is most tempted to wait.

Jesus told his disciples to stay awake and be on guard, since they did not know when the master of the house would return (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Mark 13:33-35). Watchfulness is not anxiety; it is the habit of looking at what is already in front of you and taking it seriously. Our next project carries index thresholds in its monitoring plan, and the site manager's weekly explanations now go into the register as data rather than as reassurance.

Classmates: what threshold, if any, triggers a risk review on your projects?

Reply to Natalie

Natalie, your thread on the risk audit at your hospital's outpatient pavilion project was interesting, especially the auditor's finding that 30 of the register's 84 risks had owners who had left the project. That is a sobering number.

I would distinguish what your auditor did from a risk review. The PMBOK Guide describes risk audits as examining the effectiveness of the risk management process itself, while reviews examine the risks (Project Management Institute, 2017). Your audit found a process problem: owners leaving without handoff. Williams et al. (2012) noted that detecting warning signs depends heavily on people's knowledge and communication, which suggests that a register with absent owners is blind in exactly the places that matter.

One fix might be to make ownership transfer part of every staff change, so that no one leaves the project without handing their risks to a named successor. Your audit could then check that rule quarterly. It might also be worth asking the auditor to sample a few unowned risks and rescore them, since a risk without an owner is also a risk no one has re-examined, and some may have grown while no one was looking. The results would show the steering committee why the ownership rule matters.

Did the auditor find that the unowned risks had changed since their owners left?

Reply to Chris

Chris, your thread about the lessons-learned database at your utility made a point many of us recognize: hundreds of entries, almost none read. You proposed requiring project managers to search it before every new project.

A requirement may help, but research suggests that experience travels through people more than through files. Williams et al. (2012) found that as projects grow more complex, the detection of warning signs depends more on experience and gut feeling than on formal assessments. A lesson stored in a database lacks the context that made it meaningful. Pairing each new project manager with someone who led a similar project might transfer more than a search.

Proverbs promises that companionship with wise people makes a person wise as well (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Proverbs 13:20). A lessons-learned process built on conversations, perhaps a short session at each kickoff with a peer who has done similar work, follows that wisdom. Wilson (2015) places learning at the end of the control cycle, and the conversation is where it can start again.

The database still has a role as a reference, but it may work best as a list of whom to call rather than a list of what went wrong.

Has your utility tried pairing new project managers with experienced ones?

References

Anbari, F. T. (2003). Earned value project management method and extensions. Project Management Journal, 34(4), 12-23. https://doi.org/10.1177/875697280303400403

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

Nikander, I. O., & Eloranta, E. (2001). Project management by early warnings. International Journal of Project Management, 19(7), 385-399. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0263-7863(00)00021-1

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

Williams, T., Klakegg, O. J., Walker, D. H. T., Andersen, B., & Magnussen, O. M. (2012). Identifying and acting on early warning signs in complex projects. Project Management Journal, 43(2), 37-53. https://doi.org/10.1002/pmj.21259

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