Risk Management and the Charging Moose

While I was at my cabin a few weeks ago, every time I walked out the door there was a moose looking at me. One time, I wasn’t paying attention and I walked directly into a patch of grass where a mother moose and her calf were sitting. She charged, and luckily I was close enough to the cabin to run back inside.

Just like this experience, when project management gets too casual, I think it's easy to stop paying attention to risk. Sometimes, in the monotony of menial tasks and processes, one can lose the scope of a project. In early college, when I managed minor projects in the back room of a retail store, my team and I would sometimes get so carried away with little organizational duties that we would forget about a new shipment that would be coming in. If we neglected to clean out the bay area, the new shipment would arrive like a charging moose. However, we weren’t always fortunate enough to have a shelter to run to. If the new shipment had items that were in an upcoming advertisement, for example, and the bay area was still full of product from a previous shipment, the success of the ad items would more or less be on my hands.

In project management, risks like this can be avoided if the project manager simply takes a step back and looks at the bigger picture. Project management software plays a major role in risk management, but I think common sense lends the project manager the easiest method of preventing risk. When I came by the moose and its calf, for example, had I been looking up at the scene instead of down at my feet, I would have noticed the dark hairy lumps in the grass. I knew there were moose out there, so I should have had my eyes open.

Ironically, just a day after my encounter the news covered a story about a hiker who met a bull moose on the trail. The animal charged just a few feet as a warning, but the man didn’t leave. He lingered and started to film the scene. The moose charged again, this time knocking the man to the ground and hurting him pretty bad.

When encountering project risks, I think some people (project managers and team members alike) tend to react the same way a lot of people do with moose encounters: stop and stare. Maybe they take a picture or two. Although a project may meet a risk that is surprising and / or overwhelming, the most important thing to do is get out of there. When a risk issues some sort of warning “charge,” the manager should heed it quickly; there's no room for tourism.