Perception Or Experience To Evaluate Uncertainty

The book “The standard for portfolio management” by PMI speaks about the risk management during the planning, however, it is particularly curious to me evaluate qualitative resources such as tasks scope or risks. Although, these evaluations are based on the perception of the beholder or previous experiences in similar topics.

The first skill is about scope of tasks, knowing where the scope finished and a new task should be created is a ability developed with the goal of the task, at least in the common sense, in the field, many times the customers will be asking to include new changes in the same task (and budget), if our project has not a right use of control changes and clear goal per task, we will be working on tasks without end. Here is it where knowing how to measure the scope is important.

I have been writing a couple of articles about risk management and how to face them, but, how do we really know a risk is?, it is how to measure a risk and not only prediction of failures, in some companies they compare the risks with costs, how much money the company would loose if that risk is presented during the running time, with the result they converted the qualitative risk into a quantitative risk. There are some formulas to evaluate the risks that easily we can integrate in our project management plan.

Part of our project manager role is create the metrics to calculate the uncertainty on projects, also assigning the correct value to risk management and not take it for granted. I do recommend the article “How to Measure Risk Culture Effectiveness: A Practical Guide” where many good ideas are attended to know more about scopes and risks.