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Showing posts from January, 2015

Understand the Risk Tolerance Level in Your Organization

All projects have risks and all risks have the potential for negatively impacting the project. You use risk management to determine the risks that are important enough to manage. During the risk identification process, you may encounter many risks that have some likelihood to occur and have a marginal impact to the project. The question to ask is whether the risk has enough impact on the project to worry about (this same question occurs for both qualitative and quantitative approaches). The answer says something about your risk tolerance. For example, let’s say you identify a risk that is very likely to occur, but has an impact of $100 and one-half day duration. You may choose not to manage it. You cannot list this as an assumption since there is a good chance the risk will occur. However, the impact is small enough that you are willing to absorb the cost if it occurs, rather than deal with managing the risk (which would probably be more costly). Therefore you would choose a risk manag

The Power of the Aligned Organization

When was the last time you rode in a car with wheels that were not properly aligned? Chances are it was a pretty rough ride. The car either pulled in one direction, making it hard work to keep it in your lane, or, it worked against itself as one tire pointed one way and another tire another way. The same thing can happen in our companies. The ride can be pretty bumpy, not to mention noisy, unless everyone is pointed in the same direction. That’s why it’s important to understand the five benefits of an aligned organization Benefit #1 – Ensures Everyone Works on the Right Things The first benefit of an aligned organization is that with a common goal for everyone to strive towards, the right things are worked on. Here’s the trick - you need make sure that everyone clearly understands the goal and the end game. The best way to accomplish this is to clearly communicate the strategy of the company. What are the three to five most important things your company is working on? Once those are