Knowledge Matters™

Today I thought I would share with you two new diagrams from my doctorate, because I am actually not so sure about their utility, and would welcome any feedback you might have. That said I do feel they elicit interesting management questions.

Consider the network diagram below. For a change it’s a different organisation to the one we have been looking at in previous blog-posts , but I have applied the same principles. The graph shows a programme of projects, all of which are dependent on one another for one reason or another. For example a project building an electricity distribution grid in a new town might be critically dependent on a project that is building a dam that will produce hydro-electricity.

The circles are projects coloured and grouped by business unit. This organisation assigns risk to six categories, which are shown as the red squares. The categories are real things in the real world rather than budget and schedule. For example the large red square on the left represents people risk. The project risk here is associated with accessing or retaining people with the right skill sets. For example there is little point building a tertiary hospital in a mining settlement if the doctors and nurses necessary for the tertiary capability cannot be recruited and retained. As you can see from the diagram people risk is the biggest risk across the programme. This is actually well understood in the organisation, but some of the other risks were less well understood at the programme level. Now consider the next diagram.

The projects are in the same relative position and use the same colour-codes. This time I have sized the project by the project budget in an attempt to introduce cost to the diagram. Because I have no monetary attribute assigned to the risk category they also have changed size. Perhaps an improvement on the diagram might be to allocate a monetary factor to each risk category? I’m not sure how I would do this at the moment.

A couple of observations are worth noting. The organisation understands the people risk problem so nothing startling has emerged. The size order of the remaining red squares was not the order management assigned to programme risk so the analysis may have some value. A lot of effort and resources have been directed to risk mitigation in the blue business unit. The analysis suggests management have this right, because many projects in the blue business unit have links to multiple risk categories. Despite the yellow business unit having the big budget projects there are fewer projects with multiple risk category links.

Once again, like the examples found elsewhere on this site , we are visualising collective knowledge from project managers. The visualisations allow senior management to make informed decisions and act at least as a diagnostic of programme risk health. I still think understanding the linkages matters, but this time I am not so sure of the utility of the method. What do you think?

Regards Graham