Role of a Risk Facilitator in the Risk Management Process

What is Risk

In her very lucid lecture on Risk Management, Dr. Penny Pullan provides a very apt definition of Risk, with an analogy where an archer is preparing his bow to shoot an arrow at a target. She says that risk is the uncertainty of the arrow hitting its target from the time of leaving the bow to the time of reaching its target.

Therefore, Risk is the assessment of what can go wrong and by how much it can go wrong. It is different from Issues, a difference that often gets blurred in the heat of the moment. Issue is something that has ALREADY gone wrong, while risk is something that CAN go wrong, but may or may not come to pass.

Risk Management Process

The process of managing this uncertainty throughout the lifetime of the project is called Risk Management. Most organizations feel that creating a Risk Register at the start of a project defines Risk Management. However, the Risk Register is just one part of Risk Management. Risk Management is a continuous and repetitive process in which Risk assessment and evaluation have to be performed at regular intervals throughout the duration of the project.

Ownership

Project Managers often complain that they do not have the ability to handle all the risks that they own, often due to lack of control and authority in areas that they have no say in (like a competing priority of shared resources etc.). This happens because in these situations the risk is often not been owned by the right people. The risks in a project are supposed to be owned by the stakeholders and not the Project Manager. Simply put, Risks are owned by the people who need the project delivered.

Risk Facilitator

Dr. Pullan in her lecture describes the role of a Risk Facilitator. A Risk Facilitator is a role responsible for ensuring that Risk Management Process runs properly. A Risk Facilitator maintains the quality of risks and challenges any ambiguities and brevity in the definition of risks. A Risk Facilitator is not a full time occupation. However, anyone who is identified for this role has to be someone with great listening ability, ability to ask good questions, someone who can take action and has the credibility for his opinions and recommendation to hold weight.

A Risk Facilitator needs to stay out of the working details of the project. That is why it is no a good idea for a Project Manager to be the Risk Facilitator as well for his projects. The Risk Facilitator is someone who knows who to engage at what point during the project and he constantly challenges the stakeholders to retain risk ownership instead of transferring it off to the Project Manager.

A Risk Facilitator also ensures that the team remains engaged in the Risk Management Process and does not run out of steam after the initial push at the time of risk planning. All in all, the role of a Risk Facilitator is essential to the success of the Risk Management Framework and consequently essential to the success of the overall project delivery.

Earning PMP Renewal PDUs for Free - A 5 Step Program

At the end of the PMP Certification cycle, we all have that pressure to log the earned PDUs and more often than not, we find ourselves falling short by a few PDUs. The below 5 step program will get you through that gate without hassle and most importantly, without spending a single penny.

Please note that this article caters to the PDU distribution rules at the time of its writing(Sep-2015) and the current rules may be a bit different. But the basic principle remains the same.

Step 1 - Understanding Categories

At this time there are 5 Categories for earning PMP PDUs

• CATEGORY A: Courses offered by PMI’s R.E.P.s or Chapters and Communities

• CATEGORY B: Continuing Education

• CATEGORY C: Self-Directed Learning

• CATEGORY D: Creating New Project Management Knowledge

• CATEGORY E: Volunteer Service

• CATEGORY F: Working as a Professional in Project Management

Out of these, we will focus on earning PDUs under categories A, C, D and F, as they are easy and simple to do and do not cost any money. Below is the list of PDUs that can be earned under the various categories.

Categories	Maximum PDUs that can be Earned in a Cycle
Categories A and B	Unlimited
Categories C, D, E and Fcombined	45
Category F (individually)	15

Now I will assume that you are and have been a Project Management Professional for the cycle you are applying renewal for. Therefore, you can directly apply for 15 PDUs available under Category F, leaving you with 30 PDUs to be earned for categories C, D and E

Step 2 – Planning PDUs

As I said earlier, we will concentrate only on Categories A, C, D and F. Below is a tentative PDU earning plan that you should follow for best results:

Category	Planned PDUs
A	30
C	7
D	8
F	15

Step 3 – Executing Category A Plan

Now Category A entails - Courses offered by PMI’s R.E.P.s or Chapters and Communities. One such community is www.projectmanagement.com

On Project Management dot com, there is a treasure trove of free videos, with quite a few of them associated with PMP PDUs. On the page of the video look for the below message.

The best part is that the PDUs get automatically reported to PMI. So you do not have to go through the approval process etc. Most videos have Category A PDUs associated with them, which has unlimited PDU earning capacity. So you can earn as many PDUs as you want, but I would recommend a limit of 30, as each video is 1 hr long and it may not be feasible to go through more than 30 in a cycle. One way to do this is by setting aside 1 hr every alternate weekend during the cycle for this activity.

Total number of weekends in a cycle (approx.) = 156

Alternate Weekends = 156/2 = 78

Now even if you miss the activity 50% of the time (which would be the height of indiscipline), you will easily be able to gain 30 PDUs using this plan.

Bottom-line = 1 hr every alternate weekend = 30 PDUs (Cat A)

Step 4 – Executing Category D Plan

Category D is quite simple if you are following Category A plan diligently. Since, the Cat A plan places 10 PDUs per year, at the end of every year, you can set aside 4 hrs to write an article about your chosen aspect of project management. You can host these on a personal blog which you can create at blogger.com for free.

Every hr. spent in this activity = 1 PDU in Category D

And if you miss a year, you still have the other 2 which will earn you 8 PDUs as planned

Bottom-line = 4 hrs per year = 8 PDUs (Cat D)

Step 5 – Executing Category C Plan

Category C brings us back to projectmanagement.com. Here you can find a lot of resources and articles which will earn you PDUs against Cat C. Apart from the articles, there are some videos which enable you to earn PDUs under Cat C. Look for the below message on the video page.

Note that the Cat C PDUs have to be manually reported to PMI and are not automatically reported.

Every hr. of self-learning activity = 1 PDU under Cat C

So for 7 PDUs you can go over 14 blog posts(if you are not watching videos) on projectmanagement.com with 0.5 PDUs per post. These posts are small and can be imbibed in 30 mins max. Therefore, if you target 5 posts per year, you should easily be able to earn the required 7 PDUs.

So, at the end of this step, you would have the required 60 PDUs.

Summary

Below is the summary of the activities involved in the 5 step program and the corresponding PDU gains:

Category	Activity	PDUs
A	Watching 30 Videos from ProjectManagement.com	30
C	Reading 14 Articles from Project Management.com	7
D	Two Articles about Project Management on any blog	8
F	Practicing Project Management as a Professional	15
TOTAL		60

Hope this helps you organize your PDU acquisition plan at zero cost. As always, any queries/comments are welcome.