The Working Advisor

The title of this blog is inspired by Leonard Sayle’s book, "The Working Leader: The Triumph of High Performance Over Conventional Management Principles"

A leader gets his hands dirty and interact with the day to day environment, adjusts his ideas to accommodate reality.

I am a consultant.  To many people, the word consultant brings to mind a professional who comes in to an organisation, looks at problems, writes up a document recommending solutions, and then leaves, without having any responsibility for implementing those recommendations.  Oh, and the sends a huge invoice for his services.

I believe a consultant is one who, although they may do the above, stays and helps execute the ideas they recommend. 

Execution and implementation reveals faults.  There is no harsher or more fair judge than reality.  Ideas that look good on paper may collapse when tried. 

PRINCE2 Themes

Prince 2 identifies 7 themes that the project must address continually.  By integrating these themes in its normative processes, PRINCE2 ensures that the themes are addressed.
The PRINCE2 themes are:

1. Business Case – why the project is being undertaken
2. Organization – for PRINCE2, the project is the project organisation. This theme describes the roles and responsibilities.
3. Quality – is about defining and refining the quality attributes of the product, and how the project will meet those attributes.
4. Plans – activities are planned for.  PRINCE2 defines the plans that need to be developed and the steps to undertake to prepare those plans.
5. Risk – PRINCE2 describes how project risks can be managed.
6. Change – assessment of the impact of change to the project
7. Progress – the monitoring and control of the project to ensure it remains viable and what steps to take if reality deviates from plans.

Risk - What Can Go Wrong

There are so many definitions of risk.

The newer versions include 'positive risk' and variations thereof. These definitions try to be very inclusive, to make sure they cover all possible perspectives and manifestations of risk. It can be a bit confusing. Some days

I am tempted to find a simple, clear, usable definition of risk.

I am not yet convinced that 'positive risk' should have the word 'risk' appended to it. On those days when I look at risk management as 'the management of uncertainty' I have no problem accepting that positive risks belong to this domain.

But for now, I will use as the most basic definition of risk:

Risk = what can go wrong.

Risk management = managing what can go wrong

The ‘wrong’ already implicitly includes a reference to our objectives.  If something can go wrong from our point of view, it means something going wrong in relation to our interests.  Something that doesn’t affect us is not something going wrong. So I don’t have to extend it to ‘something that can go wrong with regard to our objectives’  (in any case, I prefer to use ‘interests’ rather than objectives).

The ‘managing’ in ‘managing what can go wrong encompasses identification, assessment, and mitigation.

Let’s see how far these definitions will let me go.