What is the difference between managing a risk and managing an issue?

In this episode, Ricardo explains something that many people still confuse, are risks and problems the same things? He also gives tips on how to manage problems, small or large ones, effectively.

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Episode transcript

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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the five minutes BM podcast today. I like to talk about issue management and why are, want to start reading this forcing that issue management is not risk management because there is a huge, huge misconception on what is risk management and what is issue management? Let's explain this in 20 seconds. Risk is everything that may let me repeat that may happen in your project with a negative or a positive impact.

The key aspect of a risk is that you don't know if it will happen or not. Issue management is different. Issue. Management is a risk that became a concrete thing, and it has a bad impact as a negative and the impact. So what problem do you have? No doubt problem is something that happen and that will require action from your side. What I suggest you to do at that, the first moment to handle issues is that you, you should prepare or if it's online or if it's a web tool or whatever, you need to create a log.

And this one, you need to register all of these issues because it's very common that your product, you start to see become bombarded by different issues and you just lose track of it. And then you don't know anymore, which is this issue who is taking care of each of the issues. So create a very simple, straightforward issue. Like some of your issues could be resolved and solve it in a very simple way. If this is the case, you just create very simple columns who is responsible for taking care of that.

When is the deadline of that issue to be solved, and this will help you and to track that issues. In other cases, some of the issues are important. Issues are relevant, our complex AR many times painful issues. And what I suggest to you to do with this issue is that you treat them as a project. So to solve that issue, you will solve using the project management concepts. You already know.

So you need to plan, you need to understand which are the stakeholders helping you to sort out that issue, which is the scope of the issue, which is the timeline. Is there any cost, is there any risk on implementing a solution for that issue? So you do project management and I'm not saying that you should follow one, a specific methodology. You follow the methodology that is more suitable for that case. So maybe your pro's that plan to respond to that issue.

We'll be half a page or it to be hungry pages. It depends on how complex, what I see in most of the cases in a very competent coming from a very competent project. Manager's is that okay? The plan very well, do they make a very nice approach, very intelligent approach, but to win during the execution, the problem is starting to pop out. They just forget all the project management concepts and they become immediately firefighters.

They started, you know, that one issue he don't want to be, and then they lose completely. The kales is in place so easily. And then my question to you, why you just don't talk to you, stop and plan and say, okay, I have this problem, which are the stakeholders, which is the scope of the solution. How much time do I need? Do I need a battery be as sharp for that? Or do we need a org chart? Which kind of approach I will use on that? And this will help you to keep controlling, to keep your mind on a track of different things.

So it's, it's very important because this is what is expected from you as a project, better you or not a firefighter, you didn't study it only two be you study it and you exercise a lot of work to understand how to work under stressful conditions. But your main objective is to come down things in order to deliver the product. And not only be five fighting in the middle of a chaos, because you didn't stop to think on how you can solve that issue.

Think about that. Use project management to solve your issues. And, and I'm not saying PMBOK Prince use the one who you trust the ones who are confident in the ones that will bring you the best results. I just don't do the crazy horse methodology. Minutes do nothing because the chaos will be the King. If you do not do that, I hope you enjoy this podcast. Then see you next week with another five minutes PM. Podcast.

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What is the difference between managing a risk and managing an issue?

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