PM-Mastery

How To Build A Risk System That Works

• Walt Sparling • Season 2 • Episode 76

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A risk register doesn’t save a project. Leadership does. Russ Parker joins me to get brutally practical about what “risk management” looks like when it’s more than a checkbox: leaders defining risk appetite, teams building the habit of talking about threats and opportunities, and project managers turning uncertainty into decisions executives can actually approve.

We dig into how to start risk identification with evidence instead of a blank page. Russ shares why people and lessons learned are the best data sources, how the military’s lessons learned culture creates repeatable planning advantages, and how any organization can build a searchable lessons learned repository. We also talk about where AI for project managers fits right now: speeding up risk lists, meeting minutes, and research while still requiring human review to catch hallucinations and context gaps.

If you’re thinking about the PMI-RMP certification, we cover when it’s a logical next step after the PMP, why it feels harder, and the mistakes candidates make when they assume it’s “just projects” or “just a risk register.” You’ll also hear actionable tools like the risk breakdown structure, how to prioritize with proximity, not only probability and impact, and how to handle stakeholders who resist risk planning by showing measurable value in cost, schedule, and waste avoided.

If this conversation helps, subscribe, share it with a PM who’s tired of fire drills, and leave a quick review so more project managers can find the show.

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Welcome And Guest Update

Intro/Outro

Welcome to the Kingdom Mastery Podcast. This podcast is all about helping master your project management skills. Watch-line tips, tricks, tools, and training to get you to the next level. Watch your mind stories of other project managers on the German project management. And now here's your host, Mate Spollem.

Walt Sparling

Alright, welcome everyone to the current edition of PM Mastery. And today I am joined by Russ Parker. Welcome, Russ.

Russ Parker

Hello, Walt. I'm glad to be back.

Walt Sparling

Yes, so Russell was previously on in episode 65 back in 2025. And that was one of our uh kind of standard interviews talking about your transition from military to the PM world. And now you've got a lot of projects going on. I know one is you have a website, you're doing training, you do videos and posts on LinkedIn, YouTube. So you got your hands on a lot of different stuff.

Russ Parker

Yes, sir.

Walt Sparling

And we were talking earlier, and you you said you were busy. So tell me a little bit about your website. Or tell everyone.

Russ Parker

Yeah, so 44riskpm uh.com. It is you know the basis of what my organization, my company, 44 Risk PM is. It's going through a complete revamp right now, so I'm working with someone professionally because you know, when I first started off, I had no idea what I was doing, just kind of started creating a website one day, started copying some things I saw from other people. But I am not a web designer. Uh, so I finally reached a point where I've reached out to somebody to do it for me. But there I got a list of, you know, my YouTube courses I teach, some other type of uh free downloads that people can get, my calendar for upcoming events. So it is a central repository for everything I'm doing.

Walt Sparling

Awesome. So tell us a little bit about the uh training you're doing. You're working with PMI, right? Or on PMI topics.

Russ Parker

Correct. So I teach the PMP and I'm teaching the RMP courses. So obviously project management professional courses and then the risk management professional that recently became a PMI authorized training partner uh curriculum. And I jumped right into that, and I'm now teaching with PMI material on everything for the risk management professional certification, which has been really refreshing to see because all of the material that I took when I studied, not all of it, um most of it, a lot of it was outdated. It was really like it was hard to follow, individuals kind of just blasting a bunch of risk management information out there. Whereas what PMI has put together is more logical and it's a better flow and it really match, you know, it matches the exam. You know, and I I like to tell people they're the source, they're the ones actually building this thing. And with it being a pr really rough exam, anyone who's taken it has told me, you know, it's harder than the PMP. I personally believe it was harder than the PMP, even though it was 65 less questions, 60, 60 math real quick. Yeah, 65 less questions, but uh it's definitely it's a rough one. So again, those are those are the two main things I'm teaching. And then, like I said, I got a couple of other things out there, one being a how to run a risk workshop course, which is like my first course I put together myself, which is a lot of fun.

Walt Sparling

Awesome. Yeah, I remember talking a little bit about that when you were on the episode before back in 25. Um, are you doing some work with Tanya?

Russ Parker

Yeah, so I'm doing so one of the I teach with Project Success Academy.

Walt Sparling

Oh, okay.

Russ Parker

So they're so they're the you know, they're the premier ATP that I work with. 44 Risk PM is now an ATP. Um, so learning that whole system out, still working, still gonna you know coordinate, do a lot of stuff with PSA. They're a great organization. Uh they got a lot we we definitely connect and we overlap on how we see project management education, how it needs to be delivered. So we're definitely working in tangent to really make a lot of great things happen within the educational space.

Walt Sparling

Awesome. So I've been doing project management for a bit, and risk is you know one of those topics that uh you get into. And what I've seen is some PMs are pretty good at it. Some PMs don't even know where to start, uh, especially when you start assigning values and uh importance, you know, is it a high level, low level, medium level risk? What's it gonna cost? How much money do you allocate towards it? And how do you go about just starting with risk? And there's a lot of ways that you can do that, but what I want to do is kind of ask you some questions about risk and have you walk through um your experience.

Russ Parker

Okay.

Risk Mindset As Leadership Skill

Walt Sparling

All right. So, what are the things you talk about is a risk mindset as being a leadership capability? What does that look like in practice?

Russ Parker

Yeah, so risk management it it has to start from the leadership up. Because you know, that's where the whole risk appetite starts. Leadership has to dictate what their risk appetite is. So therefore, they need to make sure they're stressing that this is something of importance to them. If leadership's not stressing the importance, then people are going to do what they do and kind of just wave it off, you know. And we know in today's environment, things are risky. COVID taught us that if you don't have a plan for the unknown, you're going to have a lot of problems. And in the military, we had to take risk management very seriously. And I tell this to a lot of people who just don't even realize this is in the risk man in the military, we have a complete doctrine on how to do risk management. And I don't know who copied who first, and I tell this to everyone. Someone either PMI looked at military's doctrine, or someone in the military was following PMI at the time when they wrote this stuff, because down to qualitative, quantitative, you know, we don't build risk when we build risk registers, but we use a thing called risk assessment codes, a rack, right? And you're basically developing what would be qualitative risk analysis analysis on what are your most important risks. So when I went to go run a range, I would literally go through risk event. Who what what are the you know, what are the risks that could happen. So you could be like, it, you know, if we're having a range in December, it's gonna be cold. So I'm going to assign this to my staff and C O I C who's going to make sure that we have hot weather, you know, he's gonna make sure he gets with everyone to make sure that they have cold weather gear, that we are going to have hot water, so we're gonna have what we call hot rats out on a range that that way they can, you know, have some tea or coffee, something warm while we're out there. We're we do all these different things, and we decide our risk assessment code. I give it all the everything I'm gonna do to help out with it, to to mitigate it or respond to it, and then I give it a set uh residual risk assessment code, and I would have to do this for every any type of training, even in combat, I was still having to do before we went on missions risk assessment codes, and I'd have to brief this to my commander. And when you got to that slide, I don't care what else you talked about, you spent time on that. And what I learned was as an officer, that was my job. I was the risk guy because I had Marines that could do a bunch of things, just like as a PM, I have a lot of tech individuals on my job that can do a lot of great things. They don't need me to stand over their shoulder and tell them how to do their coding, how to tell them how to do all this work that they're doing. They know how to do that. What they need me to do is assess the situation, assess the overall picture, what is you know, what risk events are coming up, what events are coming up, what is the threat, what are the opportunities, and how do we take advantage or how do we take take care of them? And like again, going back to the officer side, that was my job at all times. I was constantly looking at these different threats, these different opportunities that we can take advantage of. So, what I developed was the risk mindset is a leadership tool. Leadership sets the standard when it comes to risk and it allows the team to do their work and to do it in the most efficient, effective, and most you know, PMI's term right now, you know, the most valuable, bringing that business value. And so that's really what it comes down to when it comes to the risk mindset for me.

Start With Evidence And Lessons Learned

Walt Sparling

All right, that sounds good, makes sense. One of the things um you emphasize on starting risk identification is to use evidence and not a blank slate. So what are some data sources that uh every PM should prioritize?

Russ Parker

Well, the first one you got is people. Uh, you know, there's lessons learned out there. I always say start with your lessons learned. The not a lot of organizations tend to have lessons learned. Uh we'll go into that in a second with the military. But people are your best resource. Bring people in and just ask them, what have you seen before? What did you learn before? You know, you're unless you're like the boss, there's probably gonna be someone senior in the organization who's worked on other projects who can give you some advice. This worked well, this didn't work well, these are problems we saw. Okay, or if you're like, hey, I'm thinking about using this vendor, what are your thoughts? That vendor had a lot of problems, and this is what happened. Okay, does it mean it's always true? No, does it mean something you have to investigate? Yes, but that's the whole point behind doing this whole exercise. But lessons learned is something that I think more organizations need to take advantage of. Again, going back to the military, I'm gonna resort back to there a lot. So, yeah, like you know, I spent 20 years there. In the Marine Corps, we had this thing called the Marine Corps Center for Lessons Learned. In there, everyone in the Marine Corps submitted documentation to them. So whenever you know Major Parker was assigned to go plan an exercise in the country of Egypt, a country I'd never been to before, uh, working with people I've never worked with before to help plan a training exercise for the Marine Corps. The first thing I did is go to the Marine Corps Center for Lessons Learned. And I pulled up the last, you know, five, ten iterations of this exercise with the Egyptians, and I read their reports. What went bad? Because we we always gotta say, what went bad, what went well, you know, what will we improve on? And I read those, and I went back all the way to the point where what we all know as Secretary Mattis, I know is also as General Mattis, at one point he was a captain major planning an exercise in Egypt. I got to take his lessons learned, and I got to use that and apply that whenever I flew to Egypt and I'm talking to the Egyptians. I got to work, I I had a better idea of sitting down with them and planning and understanding the how they worked. I understood the base laydown. I understood what what areas that they assigned to us the last two or three iterations that didn't work out due to space requirements, or our boats couldn't get in the right spot, or our ships couldn't do maneuver right, our vehicles had problems. I knew all that going into it. And that allowed us to plan more effectively for our iteration of it. And I use that as an example to tell people for your projects, you can do the same thing with lessons learned. You don't have to start with the blank slate. You can start with what is going well for others, what hasn't, and then you use that as a reference for your planning. And if you do that, you can you know skip a lot of the problems that a lot of people come up with or they hit to include, again, going back to the original thing, the vendor. You have a vendor who had a problem, they delivered late. So you know that this vendor provides the best quality, but this usually means you have a longer lead time. Like, so you know, in my schedule, I need to give them six weeks, not the typical four weeks that we use with maybe this other vendor. It just helps you plan and allows you to be proactive in what you're doing along the way. So best thing I can stress. Yeah, lessons learned and then people. If you don't have the lessons learned, just talk to the people. You might not have the lessons learned documented, but you can grab it from them.

Walt Sparling

Yeah, lessons learned is a is a big thing for me. And have I've had a lot of conversations on that. And the one thing is I don't believe in documenting lessons learned at the end of a project. I believe in doing it throughout the project. Oh yeah, please, yes, yes. Sharing it. Um, you know, we do in my job, I do a lot of renovation work. And when you go from, you know, the whole team does. They do we do projects all over. So when they start a project, you know, we get together and go, okay, we want to see your lessons learned. And they want to see the most updated because I've already shared the ones up to, you know, like once a couple months, I'll send, hey, here's an update. It's got a bunch of new ones on it. And uh it's important to share that because you save so much, so many issues and so much money and potentially schedule by them being aware of the things that could go wrong.

Russ Parker

Yeah, and like I said, I think more organizations need to take advantage of that, building their own repositories of lessons learned, which with AI, no one has an excuse not to. Because you can literally put these into documents, link them into Claude, Copilot, chat, whatever you want to use, and then you can ask it, and it is going to provide you the information. Like with all this AI stuff, there is no reason why you can't create a lessons learned repository.

Walt Sparling

Absolutely. And be able to pull data out of it super easy, no matter how big it is.

When PMI-RMP Makes Career Sense

Russ Parker

Wait, what what you know? When I said when I was playing the Egypt thing, I think I spent almost three weeks, two, three weeks. I was on the plane flying there, still reading through lessons learned from these other exercises. Whereas I could have got that done in a day to actually pull up the most relevant. What were all the things, you know, what would it was something, a trend along the way? Yeah, like it would have saved me so much time and effort.

Walt Sparling

So you teach the uh PMI RMP.

Russ Parker

Correct.

Walt Sparling

So why is that certification maybe the next logical step after someone gets their PMP?

Russ Parker

Well, I think logical step is uh, you know, it's different for different people. I mean, one thing I always tell, you know, after you get your the PMP, obviously, you want to get that. That is the base. Um, I did have someone pass the RMP recently who went from the CAPM. They had their CAPM, and then she ended up passing the RMP after our course. And I, you know, talking to her, she said, you know, pretty much I think a lot of the same thing that a lot of PMP students tell me at the same time is that, you know, it is a foundational element before you get into some of these heavier, heavier certifications, like the ACP, the RMP, the oh, I'm blanking here, what is it, the um scheduling professional and all these. The you know, the they are very refined, detailed, very specific certifications. So with the RMP, it's a it's a great step if you like risk management. If you don't like risk management, you're gonna have a hard time with this, right? If you if you can't, you know, if you don't like to solve problems and work with people and all this different aspect because you know you are what is five questions on the PMP? I I think I did the math. At most, you're probably getting five RMP specific or risk management specific questions on the PMP. It's now 115 questions. But for scheduling, that's the same thing. That is a scheduling exam. And I don't think I'd ever want to take that one because scheduling is not as fun to me as risk management. ACP, same thing. It is an exam full of nothing but agile, you know, and all the other certifications, they're very focused and narrowed in. So at the RMP, you're very, you know, and the RMP also is not just projects, it's programs and portfolios. So you're not, you're kind of kind of branch off a little bit from the project management piece and think at a higher level.

Walt Sparling

Yeah.

Russ Parker

So so when it comes to like the logical step, I think the logical step is based off where you're at in your career and what you want to do. Because you know, you have the PMO certification that's out there, like I said, the scheduling, the ACP, yeah, there's a there's a lot of certifications. The risk, it's a logical step if you are working in an organization that is having problems with problems popping up last minute. If you were spending way too much money on projects, if you develop a budget of 10 million, but all your projects are coming in at 10 million, you know, 500,000, whatever, and whatever it's coming up with, you know there's a problem that people need to take and actually analyze a little deeper. The risk management professional certification is going to be your best bet. Because now you can actually take that step back and start looking at things in a different light. Because that exam is going to test you across the board from planning through closing. How do you look at risk management? You know, it's not just do qualitative, do quantitative. You know, it's you're doing qualitative, you're doing quantitative, you're understanding the entire structure from this is my risk. This is how I put it into a uh rack and stack, this is how I refine the rack and stack, but also give it a monetary value. This is who I give it to as ownership. This is how we're going to respond to it, and this is how we're going to set the trigger. This is what we're going to have for backup plans and you know, all these different areas. So you're really walking through a process that's going to help your business and help your company. And where I really see this in a logical step, if I had to say it, is the project management office, the PMOs. Um, I've been kind of working through a lot of uh thought process on this, but you know, a lot of these individuals that are getting these advanced certifications past the PMP, risk management professional sitting within there. I look at this again, military. We have chief warrant officers in the military. Chief warrant officers, they are resident experts in the fields. They're not quite officers. Well, they all are officers, but they're not in the full grade officers. They're not enlisted, they sit in that middle ground, but they provide direct advice to the officers, the commanders, on how to do specific areas. But they also are involved with it. So when I had a chief warrant officer working with me, he not just advised me on how to do maintenance, how to do specific things in the company, he also worked directly with the the teams to provide, he taught them, he coached them, he mentored them on how to do things the right way. So for me, the logical step is in that PMO, if you have someone in there with the RMP, someone who is strictly focused on risk management, they can serve as As both a teacher, coach, and mentor to the PMs on how to do this the right way, while at the same time, they're advising leadership on when we went back to the first question, how they need to take risk management serious. They need to bring these questions up, set those risk appetite, those thresholds. How are we actually going to establish how the organization is going to run risk? And if you if you can get the linkage there, and I really think it sits in the PMO. I think that they are the best spot for RMPs outside of tactically working with the teams to actually run risk workshops, and but they can do that in the PMO as well. But I think the PMO is the great spot.

RMP Prep Mistakes People Make

Walt Sparling

Speaking of, I mean, you you talked about a lot of different certifications. Yeah, obviously you're talking about risk. So in your experience, you teach this and you've you've worked with students that have taken the test. What are some of the common mistakes that candidates make when they're prepping for the RMP?

Russ Parker

Well, first off, they forget that it is not just projects, it's programs and portfolios. I think like like you you know, you said you gotta branch out your mind, you gotta you gotta look at it more holistically. Also, you know, they just don't they don't think through the process of this is covering everything from from start to finish. And they think it's just gonna be a, oh, this is how we identify risks. Like, no, we're gonna talk about all the different ways that you can identify risk. Brainstorming, just one option. You have multiple other ways to find risks when it comes to running risk workshops or just sitting down with your team, going through different areas, doing Delphi interviews. There's a lot of different ways to find your risks, but there's also a lot of different ways to work them through the whole rest of the process when it comes to creating your risk register, being an advocate for it. So when it comes to studying for the exam, is like they come in, they just think, I've done risk management, I have a risk register, I have my PMP, I know what I'm doing. And you're like, it's gonna get a little more in detail here. And I've you know, in teaching the course, I've had a lot of students are like, wow, I really didn't think about how detailed this can actually get. And I try, you know, and I and I'm I'm honest up front with I when I talk to them before the course, I go, the PMP is 35 contact hours, and that's a lot of information put into 35 hours. The RMP is 30 hours. So do the math there. There's a lot of information we're still putting into 35 hours.

Walt Sparling

Yeah, if you took all the different certifications and you took the contact hours for each one and added them all together, and you think about it, the the PMP is a con uh, I want to say condensation, but a condensing of all of those into little bits because you're gonna deal with all of this as a project. But if you really want to get into the the nuts and bolts of a specific area like risk, we got a whole nother thing for that.

Russ Parker

Oh, yeah. And that's that's the best way to put it. Like, and I think when they come in there, they underestimate it. And I'm that's one of the things I try to stress is you don't want to underestimate walking into this. And sadly, I've talked to a few people who they didn't talk to me until afterwards, and they did underestimate it. And I I got to shift their mindset over a little bit, and they were successful on the back end.

Walt Sparling

So well, one of the comments you made, you're talking about someone coming in and saying, Hey, I've done a risk register, here it is, I'm good to go. And it's like when I first started in project management, we we didn't do risk registers. I didn't know what a risk register was. It's like you knew there were things you had to be careful of and watch for, but at that point I didn't have any formal education. So when I went and decided that, you know, I'm gonna go all out on this, and I decided to sign up for the PMP, and then I started going through the courses, and then I started learning about a lot of terms that I never used in my working days of project management. You know, the the different process groups and the phases that you go through that I got because I could relate those back to when I was doing projects without the formal knowledge. But the first job I got where I went in and they had a risk register, and they were like, this is required for all projects. I was like, oh, okay. I I heard about it, you know, in the in the PMI coursework. And but this was like practical, gotta do it. Oh, it took me forever to figure out how to fill that out, how to establish costs, uh, learn about trigger dates, and yeah, and then later on when I became the lead, I had to teach new PMs because same thing. They would come in and they're like, oh, what's this risk register thing? How do I do this? And they would freak out. And you know, we'd always have in our registry, we'd have like five to ten scanned, and all you would do is adjust the values, the the trigger dates, things like that. And then we would go, okay, now let's talk about what other potential things. And right now, I would just go into AI and say, here's my project, this is what it costs, this is what how it's I do construction. So it's this many stories, it's built in this area, it's got this kind of timeline. Give it a bunch of criteria for the project, and then say, give me a uh a list of risks, and then you might do brainstorming on top of that, and then say, okay, that makes sense. You know, I never thought of that. I've done that before. I've asked AI to do a list, and I've already got you know a list of 10. Then I do AI and it's like, oh, yeah, these I expected these. Oh, not that one. That's oh, that's a good one. You know, so you learn as you go with different resources.

Russ Parker

No, yeah, exactly.

Risk Breakdown Structure And Proximity

Walt Sparling

Speaking of like uh, say uh a risk register, what risk tools or frameworks, frameworks do you use most consistently?

Russ Parker

For me, I mean, and you know, you talked about the risk register. I think that is like to me, it's the foundation of what the you know when it comes to paperwork. But I think the best thing out there, the framework that I had to pick that I most appreciate, or not, I guess framework the tool, is the risk breakdown structure. I think that's very underestimated in this in the whole space because it allows you to put your risks in the groups, and uh then you get to see where you're most exposed and where you're most exposed. And it allows you to kind of throw some effort down towards that way because you know, obviously, the one thing that everyone's taught is probability impact. Again, the PMP, they're gonna teach you probability impact. That's how you do qualitative risk analysis. In the RMP, we go a little deeper. I go, probability impact is the beginning, that is the baseline. You also need to throw in some other components in there, like you know, uh proximity. If I have a high probability, you know, or let's just say I have like a medium probability, medium uh impact, but then I have a low probability, high impact, and that one though is not gonna happen for six months, whereas the medium medium is gonna happen in two weeks. Based off your how you do your scaling, the scale is gonna tell you you gotta work on this high level one. But if you add proximity in there, I need to address the medium level risk before I get to that high risk. So using the risk breakdown structure, you can start seeing where are the groupings where we have the most exposure. And I think that's very underestimated because you don't see that in just the register. The register is not going to tell you that. But a risk breakdown structure categorizing your risks is gonna be like, hey, we have a very high technological exposure on this. Let's throw a little more effort to look at those risks precisely to figure out how we can actually respond to get rid of them type deal. So if it had to come down to anything, the RBS is something I really try to push people towards.

Getting Stakeholders To Buy In

Walt Sparling

Okay. I like that. So one of the things you know we all deal with on projects is stakeholders. Yes. So, you know, they they kind of focus on what their wants and needs are or the budget or the schedule. And um what do you do or what do you recommend when stakeholders wanna just resist doing risk planning? Like, uh, we don't need that.

Russ Parker

Yeah, that that's when it just comes down to communication. Just the best thing I always tell people is find a win and then show them how that won and show them show show them what it's worth. Um you're always gonna have the stakeholders who are like, this is extra work. Why do we have to do a risk workshop? Why do we have to get meet every week to talk about risks? It's not that big of a deal. And when you show them that, hey, we had a meeting last week and we uncovered X, Y, or Z, this would have cost us $10,000 extra dollars, or this would have cost whatever. But we are able to take care of it, they start, you know, you start bringing them along and they start saying, okay, uh, this this might actually work. You could also use the peer pressure, you know, work with the other executives, have them show them that like, hey, this is something that's actually worthwhile to the team. But at the end of the day, though, it's all about just being communicated, communication, keeping your communication high and just explaining the value that you can bring at the end of the day. Because a lot of people, yeah, they see risk management as a guessing game. Um, whereas, you know, because I had someone tell me they're like, you're just guessing. I'm like, well, we're guessing a lot. That's called we're we're assuming. Let's let's you know, we're making some assumptions. Those assumptions come with costs, and therefore, those costs, we want to make sure we limit what's going to be wasteful spending. And when I said wasteful spending, the individual's like, oh yeah, yeah, we don't want to waste what you know, you gotta bring it back to the terminology that sometimes those stakeholders know. Wasteful spending is something that like they're like, oh yeah, like don't want to do that. So yeah, you gotta steer it towards them, use some terminology internal to your organization that is talking about serious, you know, with the word I'm thinking about serious effects of when something goes wrong.

Walt Sparling

Then yeah, the implication.

Russ Parker

Implication, thank you. And then uh obviously we have opportunities. I think that is probably the hardest thing to explain to a stakeholder sometimes. How do you plan for good? Uh but that you know, once you get them in, once you can get them in the bad, a lot of times you can bring them into the good too, but it just takes a little more education.

Walt Sparling

You know, from experience, I can say you can tell, like if you're brought into a project late, um, or you're added to a team and you start seeing things happen, and you're like, oh, they didn't do a risk analysis on this. I mean, these are things that if they had, we wouldn't be running into these, or there would have been time and budget allocated for it. It's just a surprise now.

Russ Parker

Yeah.

Walt Sparling

And like, how do we deal with it? So obviously you're gonna chalk it up to lessons learned and hope the next group, the next project takes it into account.

Russ Parker

If it's the if it's documented.

Walt Sparling

Yes, yes. All right, fun stuff. So, how do you get how do you get risk thinking? You know, we talk about you can tell when projects they haven't done it. Um, how do you build that as a habit in a team or in a in a PM?

Russ Parker

Well, I mean, for getting your team involved, you just gotta get it on the schedule. You know, we all know projects live and die by schedules. So if you get a scheduled event where people have to show up and talk through risk, they're gonna hate it at first, but once they see the value as the project moves on, you know, they they start buying into it a little bit more. But, you know, really getting them involved or pushing people into it, sometimes it just takes some good old-fashioned stiff arming and getting getting people in the room to do it. Um, even to the point, maybe sometimes you just have to go find the individual, sit down and just look him straight in the face and go, what do you think could go bad with this? Where where are your concerns? And they might be like, what why? And I'm like, just just tell me your concerns. What are your thoughts? You know, like, well, you know, I don't even think this is a worthwhile project. Explain to me why. Why don't you think that, you know? Like these are good information. This is good information, you know. Like, so you know, just bring that on like you don't like my project. That's great. I'm not, you know, emotionally attached to this project. It's my job to make sure it happens. So explain to me why you don't agree with it so that way at least I know that this is a problem that can sit out there. Also, stakeholder-wise, and I can also put them down as you know, they are in disagreements with this project to start off with. So, because I had a stakeholder tell me that one time, they just looked at me straight in the face and like, this project's worthless, and I don't even know why we're doing this. We've tried it before, it didn't work, so this isn't gonna work. And it was like week week one of the project, and I'm like, well, this is a great mentality to start off with here. But yeah, yeah, but I mean, that was a mark on the stakeholder register, like, okay, I got this is someone I have to work with. I Bob Smith said I need to keep them close, but also it's a risk because I learned something that they we've tried this before. So I had to research a little bit more about that. Why why did those other ones fail? Again, that's a new risk. Like these are things that you can put on your risk register, you know. Now, and that's another thing. I think that's a fallacy in there that if you put something on your register, you have to have a probability and impact, you have to have an owner, you have to, you don't have to have those things. That's what a complete risk register is. You start off with a list of risks and then you work through the process. So I always tell people, I'm like, just make the list and then have a dedicated time again on your calendar where you go through and you start working through the rest of the information on them. All right. Don't think that as soon as you write something on your register, you have to take it through the whole process. So again, that's just something I deal with. I've I've seen a lot of times where it's it's like an overwhelming thing, you know. Like they think that if I put it on there, I have to take it through this, and then they don't do it on whatcha, you know. It's just it's just something I've seen.

Risk Management As Decision Support

Walt Sparling

I love it when you when you throw something out, uh, and this is not really not necessarily a risk type thing, but you say I think you should consider doing this. And you're like, oh no, no, no, no. We no, we we don't have the money for that. We're not really interested. And then, you know, eight months later, boom, what what happens? Oh, we should have done that. Well, why didn't someone uh someone did? You said you weren't interested. You know, you talk about stakeholders and how to how to frame. So probably one of the hardest things I think for a PM is the uncomfortable conversations of going to leadership or stakeholders and tell them a risk has come to light, even if it was planned for and it's gonna cost X, or we didn't plan for this. And from what we're seeing, this is a this is a high, there's a high potential for this. Like I was working on a project where we did three buildings on a campus, and the first one it was like a 20-some-year-old building, and there were so many things discovered that it happened in 20 years that they didn't plan for. So on the and it was a lot of money. So on the next two buildings, it was like, all right, we now saw what happened. We need to consider that that is a risk on these other two buildings. Wow, that's a lot of money. Are you sure we're gonna run into that, you think? And I'm like, they're the same age, built by the same people. Yeah, I'd say it's a pretty high likelihood. And when we hit the second one, it showed up. Same thing. So it's like, well, at least now you know, because you have an idea what it cost you on the last one, what it's gonna cost you on this one and on the third one.

Russ Parker

Yeah, I think it's it's all about expectation management, is what you're getting. Yeah, like that's the whole point behind going through the whole exercise. And that's what I tell people all the time risk management is more about decision making than anything else. Why do we want to do risk management? It's it's all, I mean, yeah, we're here to protect the project, we're we're here to protect our work, make sure we know what can go well, what can go bad, all that. But at the end of the day, it is being able to take a list of information and going to the decision makers, the executives, the who the sponsor, the executive, whoever's in charge, and going, This is what we have. This could this is what could go bad, this is what can go right. If this goes bad, this is the month, this is what's gonna cost to actually cover this. And getting their thumbs up, thumbs down, because a lot of times they maybe, you know, depending on that appetite, that threshold, that tolerance type thing, something I've really been preaching lately, is they're gonna make that decision. Do you move forward? And that's why risk up front uh is such an important concept of doing it early in the project. Like at initiation, you're going through this because that is going to help decision makers make the decisions. Is this actually going to be worthwhile at the end of the day?

Walt Sparling

So and by doing by doing that, the one thing you can minimize the uncomfortable conversations because if you you get to that point and you've you said it was a risk, you've documented it, you plan for it, you got money in your contingency or whatever for it, and then it happens, and then you say, okay, well, it is potential for two weeks. We didn't, you know, delay, we didn't build two weeks of delay in the schedule, but it we knew that was a possibility, but we have the funds. And then when the you go to the business units or the the stakeholders and say, hey, we found this, and they're like, Oh my god, why and all? No, no, we knew we knew it was a possibility. Budget's already covered, you know. We we had a little bit of time in a schedule, but not quite enough, so we got to deal with that. But we knew it was tough. Or we had an idea.

Russ Parker

It just helps you be again, like my saying, proactive over reactive. Because, like you're saying, yeah, yeah, there's a risk out there that Walt, our number one guy, when it comes to doing this specific job, he needs to be available this week of October. But there is some life event, you can't be there. We already looked at this and we know because we know that this individual over here has a some they they have the skill set, probably not as good as Walt, but we can bring them in. Or we have the money set aside to contract out to this company that has the right resources that we need. And we already have the information, the contact, the pricing, and it's already built into our contingency reserves. Now we have the resources available if that happened. So it's all just about being proactive, vice. Oh no, Walt had to leave. We need to get this work done. What are we gonna do?

AI Helps And Adds New Risks

Walt Sparling

Just to kind of wrap things up. Where do you think? And I kind of had a couple questions in mind, but I'm gonna kind of combine them. As we move forward, uh, risk management, where do you think it's heading in the next decade? And I think you probably know where I'm going with this with AI.

Russ Parker

Yeah. I think AI is helping, like you already said, you can drop your information in there, it's gonna give you a good list. Now you got to take that list and refine that a little bit based off your environment, your stakeholders. There's gonna be a Lot of factors I think that AI can't put into the right now. But in the future, it's going to be a lot. You know, it's gonna be it's gonna be it's gonna be very useful, it's gonna be very helpful. I use it, it is definitely something that's gonna provide you a lot of resources. But it also brings a l its own level of risk. Something that you have to look out outside of it. Where where is it pulling the data? Where is it, what information is it bringing along? Is you know, I I there's two things I always talk about. One, again, where is it getting the information? You know, it's a computer program, it it can it can be hacked, so you can have competitors or whatever, bad actors putting information in there that is not going to be helpful. Well, at the same time, and this is the number one thing I say is a risk that everyone should have, especially if they work within a a lot within the electronics and computer and internet, and this is something I preached in the military, is what happens when the lights go out and we still need to do the work, um, type deal. And that's and I think that is a a risk that we all can easily take care of by not forgetting these basics when it comes to how we do all of this, how we communicate with each other. But when it comes to the future of risk management with AI, AI is gonna help out a lot, but you still need to refine with the human aspect because unless it gets a lot better, which sure it will, it's just not gonna take you know human error a lot of times into into play, and it has a hard time from my experience. The multiple factors when it comes to your environment, you you know, what you're doing at that time with the resources, the people, and everything that you have. A lot of times you can make a better refined judgment, but it's going to give you that first list of 10 that you definitely need to know.

Walt Sparling

Yeah, one of the things like you're talking about data sources. So I work with some large international firms, and you know, they ban the use of any everyday AI tool. And they're like, you know, be patient, we're working on something. And they both, the two that I work with, came up with their own LLMs internally, separate, separate companies, but they each had their own. Some of them have created more than one tool for different specialties, but the data only comes from their network.

Russ Parker

Which is great. Yeah, that's great.

Walt Sparling

And yeah, so the the cool thing about that is if you have lessons learned and you have historical data that you can feed into that LLM and have it assist you, which is great. I mean, I use I've used them at work, I've used, I use ChatGPT all the time, I've used Gemini a little bit. Being able to add all that data on there, notebook LM, love notebook LM. I don't know if you've used that. But even with that, there are still hallucinations. You still need somebody that has the ability to read that data and look for issues. And we say, Well, then what's the sense? Well, it's gonna really cut down on your work. You just kind of go through it and proof it. You know, I I've I do many meeting minutes now. We're allowed to use AI for that, and I go, I go review them and I go, There were two topics that we talked about, and when it summarized it, it used one of the projects in the wrong spot. And it said, Bob and John talked about it just, and I'm like, No, they didn't. I was on the call, they talked about this. So you gotta you gotta be careful with it. It's not gonna I agree.

Russ Parker

The whole AI thing has helped me tremendously with my meeting minutes. If there's one thing I despised is doing meeting minutes after, you know, if I had a day of six hours of meetings and then having to do minutes, it was like, oh, this makes it a lot easier, but you have to read through those minutes because yeah, like you said, it it'll throw some crazy things out there sometimes.

Walt Sparling

Before we um before we bring this to an end, and I'm gonna make sure we get some links in the show notes. We'll share your LinkedIn profile, share your website, and if you have some other information or maybe a specific page on your website talking about the projects you're working on, the trainings you're doing, send those to me and I'll add them into the show notes page. But if you had any final closing comment, whether it's about uh maybe PM's thinking about taking the RMP, or if they're uh thinking about using AI, well what what kind of drop can you give us to close this out?

Russ Parker

I mean yeah. No, I mean I would say, hey, I mean, if you're looking to get the RMP, obviously just to throw a little, you know, little thing out there for myself, like I'm the only one really teaching this thing right now. Uh there's other people who are doing it, but I'm the one that's like jumping into this thing heavy. But yeah, I mean risk management is not as hard as I think people make it out to be. It's just all about understanding the system, how it all works together, and how it all links into the rest of the project planning, program planning, portfolio planning. And once you understand the system, it really does make sense and becomes a lot easier. And all it does is just take a little bit of time to reflect and to really dive deep into the material. And that's what I'm here for. Awesome.

Walt Sparling

Well, I appreciate you you coming on and spending time with us. And uh, for everyone else, we'll see you in the next episode of PM Mastery.

Russ Parker

Stay motivated, stay dedicated.

Intro/Outro

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