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.
