... Better manage risks across projects and learn from them

Two elements are particularly important to me here:

1. the role of Risk Director

2. structured lessons learned by means of a specific risk checklist.

Risk Director: In most cases, there is no dedicated role for cross-project risk management. I develop this role and fill it together with you. The role can usually be taken on by existing staff. I then work with this risk director in a coaching session to improve risk management and, above all, the handling of cross-project risks. The first step is to present the important cross-project risks transparently and clearly so that an overview of all important project risks is created.

Structured lessons learned: At the end of a phase or the entire project, there is often no lessons learned or only unstructured lessons learned. People are happy to have completed the phase/project and new projects are already underway. The implicit knowledge can be transferred through collegial exchange and skillful assignment of roles in the projects. In most cases, however, this is not enough for an organization to make real progress in terms of maturity and learning. In addition to tried-and-tested and practicable methods for recording lessons learned using questionnaires, interviews or workshops, I also like to use a checklist derived from lessons learned to identify risks. This not only describes standard risks, such as those that can be generated by Chat CPT, but also describes for each risk what was experienced in another project and what was learned from it. This is in the form of a checklist of questions. In this way, a new project can build explicitly on the experience of previous projects. Incidentally, this checklist is managed by the risk director.