Establish+the+Initiative

=14.0 Establish the Initiativetoc= Initiative to me is to not wait for your manager to give you an assignment and step out of the group and take charge of something that might require you to do more than you think you are capable of. Taking the initiative is the difference between success and failure. This chapter covers the topic of establishing the initiative during a software project. Establishing a risk management initiative is researching the customer’s requirements so that you can better prepare for what risks you might face during the project. You don’t have to be a manager to take the initiative; you just have to care about the success of the project. The sections below will show you how not to take a chance on everything going right with your project and do everything that it take to ensure its success by implementing risk management.

14.1 Review Risk Management Requirements
Before you can take a risk management initiative, you have to know at least know the basics of your project’s risk management. The questions you should ask should be where these requirements are initiated; taking an uneducated initiative is not advantageous to the success of your project. The risk management requirements are sometimes set in the Statement of Work. At my job, when we write a contract we do have a Technical Assessment Task(TAT) that the SOW is derived from, and that document contains all the risk management requirements, that includes cost, schedule and performance requirements. You should check the objective and goals of the projects because risk management requirements are sometime set from that.

14.1.1 Review Contractual Requirements
You have to review all of your contractual requirements to make sure that you are meeting your costumers need. At my job, we all look at our requirements to make sure that we have not missed or miss read any requirements. The SOW is the document that you should review. Contractors and customers use different words to describe similar concepts and the table below has a few examples. As a contractor you and your customer have to be on the same page and you have to take the initiative to learn their lingo, so that there won’t be any misunderstandings. One example from the table below shows that the contractor refers to impact of risk as consequence. To take the initiative, you need to make a similar table with the words that your costumer uses, getting a better understanding of your customer can be the difference between having a happy or disgruntled customer at the end of the project.
 * **Contractor** || **Customer** ||
 * risk management initiative || risk management program ||
 * risk assessment || risk analysis ||
 * probability || likelihood of occurrence ||
 * consequence || impact of risk ||
 * risk resolution || risk reduction ||
 * risk control || risk management ||

14.1.2 Review Organizational Standards
After looking through the SOW for the risk requirements that are set by your costumer, the next place that would contain your organization’s requirements would be the Organizational Standards. In your organization’s standard procedure for risk the following should be Included:
 * A section explaining the purpose of risk management. A statement describing the benefits of using risk management like having a plan for risk resolution.
 * Should have a section explaining the Goals that are needed to be achieved by the members in the project.
 * A section that identify the policies for implementing and planning risk management.

14.2 Plan Risk Management Activities
The first part of this section dealt with understanding risk management requirements from your organization and customers, this part of this section deals with planning the risk management. After gathering all the information from reading the SOW and the organization standards, you should have an idea of what tasks to plan and implement risk management. The factors that will affect what you are able to do are the size, budget, and complexity. Adjusting the plan to fit the project is another factor that affects how you plan risk management activities. Use IDEF0 diagram like the one below to plan the tasks. The diagram shows some of elements of the project being the budget, the schedule, staffing, and the plan. These elements are used to calculate cost, the whole project schedule, organization chart, and project plans. I use the chart below to know the number of people that are working on the project, what are their availability, and what are their hourly rate, because that will affect the cost to the customers. At my job, when we set the schedule it’s based on the availability of the right person at the right time, which is basically having the right engineer to work on a part of the project when it is his time to work on it.



14.3 Budget Risk Management Activities
Budgeting for risk is investing for the future. Each risk poses a certain cost; you can pay for it now or pay for it later. If you look at the BP oil spill and all of the safety violations that they had, they decided to forgo any risk management and now the cost is the life of employees and livelihood of the gulf coast. Invest in risk management so that you don’t face future issues like BP and also like Toyota who received the biggest fine ever for safety violation that caused deaths. You should have a cost associated with each risk; you should calculate how much does a risk management initiative cost.

14.4 Schedule Risk Management Activities
After budgeting for the risk management activities, you need to add the risk management activities to the project master schedule. You want to include developing the risk management plan, training the people, baseline the risk, and verifying risk management practices as part of the activities to add to the project master plan. If you don’t have a big budget, you should schedule lower level effort for an extended period of time, so that you can have more time to deal with the high risk area. You have to order your activities in a way to have the schedule ready for the high risk areas.

14.5 Staff Risk Management Activities
The question of who is responsible for the software risk is answered in this section. The project manager is responsible for software, but it does not mean that the team members get to relax. The Project manager has to delegate the responsibilities to the team members. The project manager part is important because he gets to set everyone’s roles, which can be a daunting task. One of the roles that he can assign is the role of a risk manager that will do the task of delegating the roles. A sign of a good manager is one that knows how to keep his workload down by delegating it to others.

14.6 Coordinate Risk Management Training
After designating roles to the project team, the Risk manager has provide the training needed so that the team has the tools needed to succeed. If the team does not have the proper training, they will be overwhelmed by the task given to them, nothing build confidence like knowing what you are doing. There are two different type of training:
 * Just-enough is when you build on what the team already knows so that they will not be overwhelmed. This method is to get the team to a level of competency. They will no basics of what they need to succeed.
 * Just-in-time training is where you train the team so they can apply the concepts immediately. The training team gets the training that they need exactly when they need it.