Identify Areas Of Project Risk

There are chapters in the last part of the book that deal with handling specific risks that you might encounter across an international project. Here we will concentrate on risks that you are likely to meet up with at the start. Some of these, hopefully, will already have been addressed in the work of the project concept addressed in Chapters 1 and 2. Before we begin, the term “risk” should be discussed. Risk is a rather fuzzy concept. It is slightly different to each person. There is a need for a common definition. Throughout the book and for the past two decades, we have used the following definition:

A part of the project such as a task, subproject, or milestone has risk if there is one or more significant issue related to the part of the project.

This definition makes risk more precise. Now earlier in Chapter 2 you defined the project concept, which included identifying potential issues associated with the project. You also defined the general areas of the project. It is now time to associate these. You can use the table in Fig. 4.1. In this figure the first column lists the areas of the project. Some sample areas are given as an example. Then the second column indicates the issues that could arise for that part of the project. The third column contains any comments.

Figure 4.1: Association of Issues with Areas of the International Project

Let’s now consider some of the typical issues that you are probably going to encounter.

• Get local management buy-in and support. Almost all local managers will tell you that they will support the project. Talk is cheap, so they say. The real test is whether they are willing to assign resources to the project and participate in managerial work in the project.

• Identify and obtain team members for the project.

• Build teamwork and collaboration within the team. This is easier said than done. Many of the problems in international projects stem from talking teamwork, but then not establishing an approach in the team to ensure that collaboration is achieved.