Susan de Sousa guest posts
Writing a contingency plan for a project can seem like a waste of time when you’re just starting out in project management. Because there are so many other things that seem to be more important than your project management, it can seem like a waste of time to plan contingency for possible risks that might never occur.
Contingency Plan? – via Flickr, Clearly Ambiguous
I must admit that I fell into this category when my first job started. In fact, even the idea of a risk log seemed strange to me. This can be a smart shortcut when you are dealing with project managers who are process-bound and spend a lot of time raising risk while developing more complicated contingency plans. Over 13 years of interim project managing, I learned that project managers who do not avoid this are simply storing up problems.
It is important to remember that this work won’t give you any additional benefits. The same goes for having a risk log. It is important to identify the problems that are most important and then to determine which ones can be mitigated. This is a much more difficult task than it sounds. If you do it wrong, your entire delivery could be at risk.
The top 2 reasons to contingency plan are:
1. Successful Project Managers know that without this work, the delivery effort runs on wing and prayer with the PM hoping for the best. These cases are not uncommon.
2. Project Managers who are smart and understand what to focus on and prioritize can make sure that no matter what happens, you, the Project Manager, look “good” and have complete control over the delivery. This means that you, as Project Manager, are in a win-win situation
While it is important to know that contingency planning is necessary, it is quite another to actually be able do it well. It is a time-consuming task that Project Managers often have to do.
You need to understand how to balance all of this work.
Check out my-project-management-expert which provides you with all the information you must know in order to effectively project contingency plan, as well as explaining what is contingency planning
