Michelle LaBrosse Blogs

For some people, uncertain times trigger a sense of impending doom rather than a sense of incredible excitement. If you are worried about the future, instead of wasting unproductive hours with vague feelings of impending doom, create your own worry-ometer.

This is a technique for managing risks I created with Cheetah Project Management – it uses a very scientific technique called your GUT FEEL INDEX. I modified this from my days as an Air Force Officer/Aerospace Engineer/Reliability Specialist. We used to do something called Failure Modes and Effects Criticality Analyses to understand the potential failure modes of whatever we were designing.

So here is what you do to create your own worry-ometer.

1. Figure out the issues that concern you. List all of them.

2. For each one, identify the probability it will occur (just keep this simple – high, medium low will suffice).

3. For each issue, also look at the impact if this issue were to happen to you. (again keep it simple, high impact, medium, or low).

4. For all those with a high probability and/or a high impact, create a countermeasure. This could either something you will do to prevent it from occurring, or something that you could do if it did in fact occur.

Here is an example of how to do this:

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 1st, 2009 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Tips for Project Management, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.