Beyond the risk register: Managing change risk in your projects

Risk management

How to manage risks in change programs

Do you actively manage risk in your change project, or is it something you leave to the project team?

Everything we do carries an element of risk. On a routine trip to the supermarket, you could be hit by a car. When you go on vacation, the plane could crash. If you swim in the sea in Australia, you could get bitten by a shark!

Everything in your life, and your change project carries an element of risk.

In this article, we suggest ways a change manager can record and evaluate change risks in change projects.

As you plan and document all the activities in your change delivery planning, ask yourself what could go wrong and evaluate the risk.

Consider this.

Eight people in your project team participate in a lottery syndicate.

What would happen if they won the 60-million-dollar jackpot and all immediately left?

When we think about what could go wrong, we should refer to a risk matrix to help us decide what risk mitigation strategies we should put in place.

Example of a Risk Matrix

 

Risk Matrix Example
Assess and address risks effectively using a risk matrix – a vital tool for change managers to safeguard project success.

 

The likelihood of our team members winning the lottery is ‘very unlikely,’ and if eight of them all left, it would be inconvenient, but the project wouldn’t collapse. This would be a low-med risk.

If the whole team was in the syndicate, the impact would be severe, and the risk becomes medium.

The notice period in the employment contract signed by an employee serves as the mitigation strategy, and this is a risk for the program manager to consider, not the change manager (although a good idea to make sure you’re not all in the same lottery syndicate!)

Let’s share a real example you’ll often see in a change program:

A project is underway to migrate 400 users from a legacy IT system to a new cloud solution. A detailed training needs analysis has identified 18 modules to be delivered as mandatory training across all regions in an ambitious change delivery program. All training is to be delivered face-to-face by a single subject matter expert.

A savvy change manager should identify and raise multiple risks and recommend mitigation strategies.

Having a single training provider carries significant risks.

What if the trainer is sick?

What is the likelihood of the trainer contracting COVID and not being able to deliver
the training?

If the trainer could not deliver the planned sessions, what would be the impact on the
business? The change manager should consider the following:

  • Could the training happen at a later date?
  • Would that impact go-live or data migration?
  • Would costs and work schedules be impacted?
  • Are the travel costs for the trainer refundable or transferrable?
  • If the trainer is quarantined but feeling well, could delivery be switched to online?
  • What if the trainer becomes hospitalized?

These are just a few considerations to be factored into the planning.
Checking the above scenario in the risk matrix would likely register a med/hi risk level,
because the likelihood of a trainer getting Covid is possible and the impact would be high.
So what do you do?

Either accept the risk, or mitigate it.

Risk mitigation could involve:

  • Upskilling more than one person to deliver the training.
  • Creating video learning that could be consumed on demand.
  • Move the project go-live date so if dates needed to change there was more flexibility
    around delivery.

Most projects run lean on funds and resources and time, so accommodating this risk
mitigation would put additional stress on the project.
The program manager/sponsor should decide.

Do we mitigate this risk or accept it?

The change manager’s responsibility is always thinking about risks associated with their
change delivery.

Identify them.
Think about the likelihood and severity and suggest mitigation strategies.

It’s rarely your responsibility to make the decision, but a great change manager will make
suggestions and recommendations.

Have a risk register in your change plan and record details of risks raised and acceptance
sign offs. Our ChangePlan software includes a risk module to make it easy for you to do this,
and record risk metrics in your organization. Contact Mick for a Demo.

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We should also call out the difference between managing risk in your change project and the
discrete job function of ‘Risk in Change Manager’, because they are different. In recent
years we’ve noticed new functions participating in large change projects with the job title
‘Risk in Change Manager’. This person is a risk specialist assigned to the project to identify
issues that could occur during or post implementation. It’s important to clarify that this is a
risk specialist working on the change, not a change person looking at risk.

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