Project Risk Management - Tips to Stay Away From Risk of Anonymous Sources Including WikiLeaks

I’m sure most of you know about WikiLeaks. It is a non-profit private organization that leaks classified documents from various sources. On 28 November 2010, they started to publish classified documents of detailed correspondence between the U.S State Department and its diplomatic counterparts around the world in five major newspapers.

If we look at the Leaks from a Project Management standpoint, you may wonder how WikiLeaks compiled tons of internal data from Government agencies and corporations in spite of technologies and tools being used by these agencies and corporations.  Another intriguing thing is that way in which they have organized themselves to have secret conversations with organizations around the world in order to procure the secret documents. How do we minimize such risks? I feel that the following three tips can help organizations to eliminate or minimize the impact of such risks.

Identify and access risks on a continuous basis: In theory, risk assessment is an ongoing activity from project beginning till closer. However, in practice, some organizations perform risk assessment in an ad-hoc manner. In a recent Project Resource Management survey, the management researchers from Cognitive Technologies Inc. have posted the question “Do project managers consistently apply a risk management methodology throughout the lifecycle of the project?” to executives. Below summarizes the executives’ viewpoint.

• 13% of survey respondents said they “always” take risk management into account.
• 54% of survey respondents said they “usually” take risk management into account.
• 31% of survey respondents said they “sometimes” take risk management into account.
• 2 % of survey respondents said they never take risk management into account.

I’m sure it is impossible to identify all risks upfront. However accessing risks on a continuous basis would definitely help project managers to reduce the frequency and intensity of negative risks. I think Project Managers can action this on their projects.

Apply the best risk management strategy: Risk management is a process or group in an organization that takes action to get maximum benefits from all positive risks and to reduce negative risk. PMBOK suggests four risk management strategies such as Accept, avoid, mitigate and transfer to handle risks. In my opinion, by using a suitable risk management technique, organizations can reduce the impacts of risks considerably and I believe Project Managers can implement this in their projects.

Create Risk Awareness at all level of an organization: Every organization carries an element of risks. Especially if a company is doing business over the Internet, the risk is much higher whether the company is a billion dollar company or a small company. Performing risk analysis on a continuous basis and using the right risk management strategy would help organizations to identify risks in advance. However, creating enterprise-wide risk awareness would act as a prevention mechanism to avoid most of those risks. Project Managers should educate their management to create such programs for their organizations if they haven’t been doing this before.