Episode 148.1: Risk Management - Critical Success Factor for your Project - Part 1

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Part 1. This episode of The PM Podcast is a 4-part webinar presented by Andreas Heilwagen on the topic of risk management. He stipulates that it is a critical success factor for your project success. We look at a definition of Risk Management, present the value that it offers to your projects, go through the processes offered by The PMBOK® Guide, take a look at the free risk management templates [Update: the template website is no longer available, so we removed the link] offered by Andreas and the look into the success factors that will make your internal risk management approach a winning activity.

Whether you are working in a predictive environment, a hybrid project delivery environment, or considering risk management in agile projects, you'll find tips and tricks to learn from and implement in this webinar.

Episode Transcript

Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only.

Podcast Introduction

Cornelius Fichtner: Hello and welcome to The Project Management Podcast™,. I am Cornelius Fichtner. In this episode, you are going to see an interview that I did with Andreas Heilwagen from Germany.

His presentation is all about risk management and what it means to your project. In essence, risk management, it’s a Critical Success Factor for you. The presentation is about an hour and 10 minutes long so I cut it into 4 easily digestible parts.

Enjoy.

Podcast Interview

Cornelius Fichtner: Hello everyone. On the line with me here via Skype is Andreas Heilwagen from Germany. Hello, Andreas!

Andreas Heilwagen: Hello, Cornelius! How are you?

Cornelius Fichtner: I am doing very well. Thank you very much and thank you also for offering to try out to do this recording of your presentation here via Skype.

The presentation we are going to look up is Risk Management – Critical Success Factors for your Project. But before we get going with this, let’s introduce you to our listeners. First of all, here you are, Andreas Heilwagen. You are a PMP®. You are also a self-employed program and project manager. And you told me before we started this recording that you prefer program management because you like to be up in the strategic level. But you also like introducing project management in organizations and by that I assume you mean, they have no project management and then you help them introduce the project management processes, is that right?

Andreas Heilwagen: Yes! It is the most interesting setting and next week, I will start introducing project management in such a setting at Lake Gothensee in the south of Germany. They have product management and software development team leaders which do project management. They don’t have dedicated project managers so it’s an ideal playground to assess what they can do and to plan what they should do in other projects that also improve project management. Analyze the capabilities, what the company already does and look for the potential which can be used and then we work on that. But as usual, working on a green field is perfect.

Cornelius Fichtner: Yeah! Being able to do something completely new and helping companies.

You were also involved in the PMBOK® Guide Fourth Edition. I believe you helped in the translation verification of the PMBOK® Guide Fourth Edition, right?

Andreas Heilwagen: Right! And I hope it will be released soon. We are doing the last checks on the translation. We want to verify that the terms are all translated in the same way and such thing.

Cornelius Fichtner: Yeah, consistency, that helps. That helps.

And you’ve also helped with the DIN Norm for project management so you’re quite the process developer there.

Andreas Heilwagen: Right! I also have a Prince2 certification and an IPMA certification so I’m trying to be fluent with all leading standards in the German-speaking countries. And my proposal to companies is to help them select the right standard or collection of standard as basis for their project management system.

Cornelius Fichtner: Okay.

Andreas Heilwagen: Usually, such a company has to decide: “Okay, we are Prince2 minded and yes, we want to do PMI.” and then they choose a consultant company who is good with that certain standard. I am trying to support companies one step before.

Cornelius Fichtner: Okay, but you are not only supporting companies because you are also very publicly available. You have a project management blog. Here is the project management podcast from Germany: The www.pm-podcast.de and the pm-templates.de [Update: both websties are no longer available, so we removed the links]. I think this one is yours, right, the www.pjmb.wordpress.com?

Above are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete PDF transcript is available to Premium subscribers only.