Relationships with higher management levels

Everything we do in a project should be aligned with higher levels of management, but there are different degrees of importance, and risk management is one that requires a lot of attention in this area.

The main reason for the sensitivity of risk management is that some risks impact more than one project in a company, and when they do, it’s best to respond to those risks in a holistic, unified way. To this end, you should ensure that the portfolio management layer of the organization maintains a list of overall risks that impact more than one project, along with their associated risk responses, and makes it available to all projects. Conversely, the list of risks from each project should be available to the portfolio management level so they can frequently review and identify risks that could impact multiple projects, and move them from the project layer to the portfolio layer.

You may be wondering what to do if your organization doesn’t have a portfolio management system. Unfortunately, there are countless problems that can arise when there’s no portfolio management layer, and there’s no solution for that other than implementing proper portfolio management! However, if you’re a project manager in an organization that doesn’t want to have a structured portfolio management system, maybe you can talk to other project managers and convince them to have monthly meetings to get together, share lessons, and talk about high-level risks across projects.

Remember that project management is about doing things right, whereas portfolio management is about doing the right things.