I have written already about the following domains: Development approach, Stakeholders, and Teams from the domains listed in the PMBOK Guide 7th edition.
In this post, I will share few tips on how to bring your ‘uncertainty’ domain to life.
What is the uncertainty domain?
The uncertainty domain affirms the concept that projects are expsoed to different levels of risks and approtunities and project managers should be equipped and ready to assess these that occur and decide how to handle them.
Project Management Institute includes ambiguity, complexity, volatality and risk to the spectrum of uncertaintiy that projects must be aware of. As project practionier, I believe it will be very helpful for you to understand the different responses to threats and opportunities. Understanding them will help you decide how to surface them in your ecosystem and in this case, deploy features in Asana that will help you bring them to life.
Projects can respond to threats by: Avoid, Escalate, Transfer, Mitigate, and Accept.
Opportunities responses include: Exploit, Escalate, Share, nhance, Accept
I wont go through the details of each of these responses on here, as I am sure you will be able to find plenty of resources to elaborate further. The main concept I want to share is for you to understand that when a threat or an opportunity arise, you will have to decide to:
- Note it and do nothing,
- Note it and do something to remove it,
- Note it and work with it.
So what features can you use with Asana to bring your project risk to life. You need to understand the level of maturity of risk management in your project and organisation first. This will help you decide whether to deploy something simple or a bit more sophisticated.
The final outcome in my opinion should always be the visibility of the uncertainity that occured and its impact on your project. For this, I highly recommend you maximise the use of your project / portfolio / goal status update.
Why is this important?
By reporting on an uncertainty (whether a threat or an opportunity) in a status update, it takes away the personal attachment to the item. It allows you to report on the issue as factual as possible, link it to the milestone, task, or phase in your project and explain what happened and what will happen. It brings a level of objectivity that will ensure you do not fall for the watermelon effect in startus updates.
Let’s keep it simple:
Create a section in your project called Risks.
Utilise the project views feature. Keep this section at the bottom of your project and keep it collapsed for the main view. Create a nother view where you collapse all other sections and keep the risk section uncollapsed at the top of your list view. Save this view in a new tab and call the tab risks.
One way to approach the process flow is the following:
- when an uncertainty is identified, a new task is added. The task name is the uncertainty itself. Ensure the task details are complete, description, context, impact of project.
- use custom fields. Create when that is titled uncertainity and it offers to options: threat or opportunity. This helps you in reporting further down the line.
- Create another custom field called Action. Include options to Action Required, No Action, Update Project. Of course you can customise these responses and align them with your organisation’s policy.
- Utilise the approval feature. This is handy for the stakeholders that will have to support you when these arise. Use the approval feature as subtasks under each uncdertaintiy task.
So what is the operational workflow?
Each uncertain task remains open - not complete.
every review you do can be tracked in the form of an approval task. You can define the three types of approval to the responses of you offer. Approve means X, Require Change means Y and Reject means Z.
Only add comments and documents to the task itself. This helps you in following a complete trail of history as your project progresses
Utilise the description box in your task and include headlines in the box. One of the headlines should be Milestones. List the milestone that this uncertainity has impact on in your project.
Once the uncertainty is completely gone, you can mark this task complete.
So what do you do when someone requires you to make changes i.e. note the uncertainty, work with it, meaning your project scope or your project schedule / resources will have to change?
Copy the link to this task and keep it i your clipoboard.
Go to your main project and make necessary changes. Any change you make, ensure it is accompanied by a comment explaining why the change, and link the task to this risk task. This will help people get context on why this change is happening.
Once you compelte all the changes, immediately issue a project status update.
LEt the summary be the risk identified and the impact on the project.
Link all the tasks that changes in the status update so the stakeholders know directly what is impacted. As you know with asana, anything you link is clickable and reachable from the same screen you are in. This allows your stakeholders to read and navigate to the task that they want to dive deep into.
In project management, we are always required to review and assess the status of the risks. The frequence of the review depends on project size and company policy. Once you have that, create an occuring task ’ Review Project X Risks ’ and make it assigned to yourself if you are the project manager / owner.
This is a simple way to sue Asana to bring the risks to the surface and the actions associated with their review. The more you become advanced, the more features you can use.
For example, if a task is marked threat, and action is required, auto create an approval, assign it to X person and give it due date + xx number of days, adding your self as a collaborater.
You can also create task templates for threats vs opportunities that team members can use to submit an uncertainity, and the workflow will automatically populate what is needed.
By doing so you should hopefully demonstrate how you work with uncertainty. Above all, by doing this, you are normalising the fact that sometimes, things go wrong. That is ok, and they should be dealt with and not brushed under the carpert. You will not fall faul of the watermelon effect.
I hope you enjoyed reading this post.
Rashad
Resources:
- Status updates: Asana Help Center
- Project views: Asana Help Center
You can ready about the first two posts here:
I hope you find it a bit useful.
