When a Company is Few Projects, or Worst One Project, Away from Disaster

Some companies have limited number of projects. And even in those projects there are several challenges as explained below.

A certain group of projects are from the parent which are there because of family relations between the management of the company and the parent. This situation carries following risks:

• What happens when someone in the family on either side either dies or is shunted out?
• What happens when there is a takeover of the parent?
• What happens when the parent starts going down the drain?

The biggest project is the only one of its type with the largest team size with people whose skills cannot be utilized outside this project. This situation carries following risks:

• What happens when the customer of this project terminates the contract suddenly?
• What happens when there is massive attrition in this project?
• What happens when there is high level of disengagement in that project due to repetitive but high pressure nature of work?

The projects are mostly small in size and short in duration and their ratio in the overall project portfolio is extremely high. This situation carries following risks:

• What happens to the core skill-set of the company since work comes based on whatever is the flavor of the season?
• What happens to people who are brought with specific skill-sets for executing a project and have no real work after the project gets over?

There are too many internal projects with no clear defined deliverable as well as no real estimate of their return on investment. This situation carries following risks:

• What happens when these projects are staffed with heavy weights (not heavy in terms of competency but in terms of compensation)
• What happens when these projects stay in R&D mode forever with no real, concrete outcome getting generated.

There are many reasons for this to happen the primary being lack of professionalism and real leadership in such companies.

Decisions in such companies are taken in meetings where the funny four musketeers meet their master.

The master is like the ring master in the circus and the funny four are like donkeys without any brains or ethics.

Such companies are run on the whims and fancies of the master.

The master also has his master controlling him remotely from a far away site.

The company is more of a circus then a company.

And such companies are just a few projects, or worst one project, away from disaster.

Risk-Based Thinking

Risk-based thinking is a management approach that relies upon anticipating the future and adjusting the plans accordingly so as to be better prepared for things to come.

The whole idea behind calling a future anticipated event or happening as a risk is based upon following criteria:

Likelihood

• The occurrence of that event has an associated likelihood. 
• The likelihood could be at different levels such as low, medium, high. 
• So something with high likelihood means that it is very likely to happen.

Impact

• The impact should that event happen has an associated severity. 
• The severity of impact could be at different levels such as low, medium, high. 
• So something with high severity means that it will lead to major consequences.

Risk-based thinking has been made a key and essential element of ISO standards such as 9001:2015 and 27001:2013.

So in the above ISO standards, the purpose of the management system revolves around ensuring risks to the organization's objective are identified and managed.