How would you work with stakeholders to identify risks that are of a technical concern?
It is important to recognize that you and or your team may not possess the necessary skills, knowledge, or even awareness regarding certain aspects of a project that may require a heightened level of expertise. This will require additional efforts and research to be most effective for the sake of the project and team. Therefore, it is essential to collaborate with stakeholders to gain awareness of their knowledge, experience, and resources to best understand the risks associated with the technical concerns of a project. In addition to collaborating with key stakeholder, you should also seek out advice from other subject matter experts (SMEs) as part of your research to fully understand the ins and outs of the technical concerns and their solutions or resolve. Engaging with the technical stakeholders to understand their concerns and gather their inputs on potential technical risks that you are not likely aware of or have minimal knowledge of. This will help in identifying the areas that require additional attention and focus requiring additional research and work (PMI, 2021).
You can collaborate with these stakeholders to determine the probabilities of risk and conduct a thorough risk analysis leveraging their expertise. You can also work together to prioritize risks from the most likely or most impactful risk events to the project. You can then work on an action plan or strategies to mitigate those ranked risks with the advice and collaboration of the stakeholder (PMI, 2021). Furthermore, by working directly with the stakeholder you can ensure clear communication and a means to manage and/or meet the stakeholder’s expectations (Lohrey, 2022).
Ultimately, there is so much value to developing rapport with SMEs and stakeholders with technical knowledge to ensure your project continues to process successfully. SMEs can provide training to team members on technical concepts and tools. This can help in improving the team’s technical skills and knowledge, leading to better quality deliverables. SMEs can provide problem-solving support to the project team in resolving technical issues and challenges by offering their insights, suggesting alternatives, and providing resource support. Lastly, you can work with your stakeholder on the strategies in response to risks identified including exploitation, sharing, enhancing, or accepting before presenting to the project sponsor for the final decisions (Winters, 2009).
The added benefit in addition to the knowledge gained from this collaboration may potentially include more invested interest by that stakeholder and/or SME. The stakeholder may want to stay involved with the progress, status, and results. They may want to further lend their perspectives and provide ongoing contributions to help your project be successful. Waxer even suggests the SME can take on much of the component freeing up the project team’s time by allowing them to focus on other tasks as there are undoubtedly cost and time constraints for the team (2012). Lohrey calls this “converting” your stakeholders to advocate for you and suggests it could lead to potential surprised benefits like “additional funding or assets” toward the project (2022). Furthermore, Winters suggests these players can remove barriers and help develop best practices (2022). You showed the initiative to reach out and collaborate with them, so hopefully, they will continue on with some sort of added benefit or support. Simply opening the door to collaboration can be powerful and potentially extend a bridge for further discussions and resources.
Overall, SMEs can provide immense value with critical technical support and guidance to a project team helping to ensure that technical concerns are effectively addressed and mitigated; thus, it is in the project manager’s best interest to tap into the expertise of these stakeholders and seek out SMEs when faced with a technical concern to identify and appropriately address risks and meet expectations.
Respond to Josh with at least 100 words and one resource/citations:
Working on technical projects come with associated technical risks that can be challenging to manage because the causes and outcomes of these risks may not be well understood by the general stakeholder audience. It is imperative to engage the relevant subject matter experts, or SMEs, to be involved in the risk identification process early on so that technical risks can be properly identified and managed, such a risks caused by poor production processes, limitations of technology or capabilities, or lack of specialized skills (Lteif, 2023). Similar to non-technical risk, technical risks are characterized by a scenario which impacts performance, a likelihood of occurrence, and consequence/impact (Shea, 2019). Without having the necessary SMEs in the room to properly contribute to scoring these risks, a project team will likely miss highly critical risks that need to be avoided, mitigated, or monitored.
Since technical risks are only one factor in risk identification that require the presence of the SMEs, the rest of the stakeholders should also be included in reviewing risks. Risk awareness is a responsibility of the entire project team, for both technical and non-technical risks, and the interdependence of risks and risk mitigation decisions calls for collaboration among all stakeholders. Risk-informed decision making (RIDM) and continuous risk management (CRM) are two processes that can be effective in managing highly complicated technical risks, particularly for international, multidisciplinary projects when pure judgement and intuition is not sufficient to fully understand the risks or their potential scope of impact (Lteif, 2023).
