That’s the verdict of the group who attended the talk I gave to the APM’s Birmingham chapter last Monday evening and I couldn’t be more happy.

Here’s what the APM had to say about the night on the their website:

Monday 4th April, saw an engaging and very well presented talk from Bryan Barrow, around reducing project risks to deliver projects on time and under budget. The meeting was really well attended, probably the highest attendance level the Birmingham chapter has had this year, and the sandwiches soon disappeared as members got into good discussion prior to Bryan’s presentation.

Bryan shared his many years experience in dealing with risk management as a consultant within the IT world. His presentation talked through the approach to risk management, the critical importance of engaging with stakeholders and the fact that communication holds the risk management process together. He used excellent analogies and real life examples to talk about the importance of getting your project teams fired up about risks and how, as a team, risks can be effectively identified, quantified, owned and dealt with.

Members were able to take away some really practical, useful tips about managing risks within their own businesses. This was clearly evident when it came to the Q&A session at the end of the event; there was plenty of actual examples that people had brought with them about real problems within their businesses around risk management and Bryan was able to give some great guidance on ways to approach and tackle the problems. The simple approach of focussing on your top 10 risks and mitigating these quickly and effectively so that you can move on to your next top 10 risks, was a technique that Bryan assured us would work in any business for any set of risks and it was these straight-forward, common sense tools that bought the material to life.

So, a thoroughly enjoyable and useful evening was had by all. I would have no hesitation in recommending Bryan’s presentation and talk to any other Branches or chapters; risk management is always a topic of discussion that hits the mark for project managers and Bryan delivered some great ideas, tips, tools and techniques to help get risks under control.

I’m really chuffed with this feedback and I’m looking forward to my next talk even more.

Just read an interesting post by Christian Steinbrecher on keeping your project scope under control.

Christian makes a very good point that you’re unlikely to know the true scope of a project at the start, so the need to manage customers’ expectations as the project develops is essential.  I think he’s spot on.

I often like to think of the scope as two circles: one covering my customer’s expectations and the other of what I believe can be delivered.

If the two circles don’t have sufficient overlap then there will be a problem, as any project starting off with expectations that cannot be delivered is going to fail.  Getting a high enough degree of overlap to make the project viable is a key step.  Helping my customers to understand what can be delivered is another, not just for my customers, but for me too.  For example, understanding not just what is expected, but when it is expected, helps me to shape the project in terms of a whole bunch of things including:

• the project life cycle model I choose to use;
• the time, money and resource I need, and;
• the risk that I may need (or may be asked) to take on.

Four questions for you to ask yourself when trying to understand the scope of your project

1. What drives your customer’s expectations?
2. What drives your understanding of what can be delivered?
3. How can you increase overlap?
4. What can you do to minimise the risk of mismatched expectations?

This is one for the “You couldn’t make this stuff up” category.

I’d only just finished posting a series of articles on famous risk takers, including one on Nick Leeson, the man who brought Barings Bank to its knees.  I concluded that article by saying that if systems are left open to abuse they will be abused.

I then read this Daily Telegraph article about a trader with PVM Oil Futures who, having spent the best part of a day and a half drinking over the weekend, bought seven million barrels of crude oil on the futures market.  The move cost the company $10M and led to a $7.6M loss.  It could have been much, much worse.  The Telegraph, in a follow-up article today reported that had the company not taken swift action to unwind the trades it could have cost them as much as $400M.

I couldn’t stop laughing. Well, at least there was a happy ending.

There is a serious message for companies here though.  We’ve seen this year how reputational risk can crucify a business.  Just watch what has happened to BP in the aftermath of the oil spill.  BP’s share priced has plummeted, people are queuing up to condemn their working practices and there are now reports circulating that they could be ripe for a takeover by one of the other oil giants.

No matter what line of business you are in, you always have to be on the lookout for those risks which, while very small, could kill your company stone dead.  It doesn’t just happen to companies like BP and PVM.  It can happen to you.

Just been looking at a great PowerPoint presentation from Conrad Weisert of Loyola University Chicago.  In it he:

• Provides an overview of a number of project methodologies, including RAD, XP and Agile
• Gives a summary of the advantages and disadvantages of
• Challenges the notion that project reporting has to take ages and presents a simple approach to project reporting that anyone can follow.

I particularly love his approach to task status reporting, where a task is either complete or incomplete.  Amen to that!

Conrad’s website has a whole bunch of great resources, definitely worth a look.

It’s been a tough 48 hours but it’s over now.  I’ve just pressed the print button and my trusty printer is now churning out the first of over 40,000 words.

This isn’t the end of the book, just the completion of the manuscript.  However, I’ve been running around with this monkey on my back for so long that it seemed at one point I’d never finish this.

I’m off downstairs shortly for a “print party” to celebrate.  Tomorrow I start the next phase of bring this book to life.  Right now though, I’m just going to sit here and smile.

Last week I mentioned the findings of a survey that revealed call centres left their customers open to identify theft and fraud by not protecting their personal data.  Now, just a week later, comes the news that Zurich financial services “lost” the personal details of over 50,000 customers.

The information went missing when a back-up tape was transferred to a storage facility in South Africa, but Zurich doesn’t know how or exactly when the loss occurred.  Even worse, it has taken almost a year for it to contact its customers to alert them to the danger they now face.

Zurich has offered its customers free identity theft protection, but that’s like locking the stable door after the horse has bolted.  It would have been much better and more cost effective for Zurich to have safeguarded the data in the first place.

Zurich will spend hundreds of thousands at the very least to deal with the consequences of not adequately protecting against this particular risk and it could cost them even more.  Earlier this year HSBC Bank was fined £3.2M for losing the details of nearly 200,000 policy holders.  HSBC wasn’t alone, it was one of several companies fined for not taking sufficient care of personal data.

So what can you learn from this?  In order to minimise the risk of loss you need to consider the specific risks that you face and to design and implement countermeasures.  In Zurich’s case it might have been enough to have tighter processes for the transfer of the data and the ability to track the safe delivery of the back-up tapes right the way through to the new storage facility.  HSBC’s problems could have been dealt with by improving training and awareness of the importance of protecting confidential customer information.

What about you and your project?  Ask yourself these questions:

• What risks are you running right now that you need to deal with?
• What will it cost if you fail to prevent them?
• How much will it cost to implement likely solutions?

Chances are that dealing with the problem in advance is much, much cheaper than tackling the aftermath.

I haven’t talked much about the Olympics, so I guess some distressing news is long overdue.
This time it’s the news that Great Britain won’t be able to field a full Olympic team for the first time in more than 50 years because they are £4M short.

Seems small change when compared to the more than £9Bn that we’re spending on hosting the games. However, it seems that participating comes a distant second to overspending.

So, what’s the link to risk?  For me this is a perfect example of opportunity cost at work.

The cost of staging the games is that we have to give up, or put at risk, other things that we’d also like to do. After all, we can only spend the money once.  It seems though that this was not a price worth paying, if it means that we can’t field a full team, we take money away from grassroots sports and we risk getter a poorer return on our investment in athletes because we’ve spent the money on infrastructure.

I’m often accused of being paranoid because I’m reluctant to give companies, especially call centres,  my personal data.  “Most of these companies simply can’t be trusted to look after it” I usually say.  The person I’m telling this to often rolls their eyes skyward, convinced that I’m a luddite.

From now I’ve tell them this:  97% of call centres fail to handle personal data securely.   That’s the finding of  audio recording specialists Veritape.  They carried out a national poll of UK call centres and found that customers’ sensitive information – including three-digit credit card security codes – were “routinely stored on call centre computer servers, leaving them vulnerable to hackers.”

You can get the full report from Veritape.

Seven UK council were found to have acted negligently in depositing finds in accounts in Icelandic banks, just days before the banks collapsed last year. That was the finding of the Audit Commission, which itself deposited funds with Icelandic banks.  Had these banks acted in time losses would have been reduced by about two thirds.

The practice of depositing funds in different institutions and in different countries was adopted to reduce risk of financial loss.  Councils were also obliged to deposit funds to maximise returns.  Unfortunately the speed of the downturn in the market caught seven councils by surprise.  Of these one or two suffered losses because they failed to follow their own policies and procedures.

The lesson here is: be aware of emerging risks brought about by the change in business / market conditions.  This is what I refer to as the tenth in my list of the top ten risk management mistakes.

In the April newsletter I called for people in positions of responsibility to behave ethically.  I also said that I didn’t expect this to happen any time soon.

Only hours later came the news that Employment minster Tony McNulty claimed “second home” expenses of £60,000 for a house in his constituency that he shared with his parents, despite living just eight miles away.

In a marvellous piece of double-talk McNulty defended his expense claims, saying “he’d done nothing wrong”, but he also went on to say that “anomalies” in the system needed to be looked at.  This comes just months after Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, was found to have claimed £116,000 for second home expenses by claiming that her sister’s bedroom was her main residence.

Prime minster Gordon Brown has now called for a full review of MP’s pay and allowances.  Which usefully won’t report back until after the next general election.

I’m pretty sick of hearing people say that they “hadn’t broken any rules”, or that they’d “acted in good faith”, or that they’d received assurances that what they were doing “was all above board”.

McNulty’s defence that he’d “not broken any Parliamentary rules” is no different to senior executives asking for their bonuses despite bankrupting their businesses.  Right from a legal perspective.  Wrong from a moral perspective.

In the past year we’ve seen how reckless, risky decision making by financial institutions of all kinds has ruined our economy and left taxpayers to pick up the bill.  There’s no wonder this all went unchecked if politicians, like business leaders, couldn’t tell the difference between right and wrong.