One of the dangers of focusing on people and relationships in the Stakeholder Influence Process is that it draws attention away from events which could happen. High impact events are fairly evident, but not always anticipated, or planned for. Quite often, events pass by without being noticed for their potential to help or hinder the project you are working on. For this reason, taking at least a quick glance at this potential could show ways to accelerate your project, or move out of the way of things which could damage your progress.
To avoid over-complicating things, a risk is an event which could have a negative impact on your objective and an opportunity is an event which could have a positive impact.
The greater the impact (positive or negative) and the higher the changes of the event occurring, the more notice you need to take. When considering these major events, you may decide to take preventative action now or prepare a plan of action (agreed by stakeholders), which you would implement if the event happened.
It could be that the objective you are working on is already of sufficient size to warrant a formal approach to risk management, in which case use it maybe with the addition to consider the positive events too, since these are often ignored by other processes. However, you can still use this at a personal level around – if you like, the risks and opportunities for you as an individual. Sometimes, a little private preparation and positioning can be very useful!
A Few Examples
- Mergers, Acquisitions and Take-Overs.
- Company profit warnings.
- Peter is given responsibility for governance.
- CEO resigns suddenly.
- Resources are pulled onto other urgent projects.
- Legislation changes, regulatory reports, bad or good audits.
- Sickness of key resource.
- Competitor market strategy changes.
These are just some examples to get you thinking of what could happen around your organisation that could have either a positive or negative impact on you.
Here are a few exercises to help you further on this topic.
- Organisational Risks and Opportunities
- Assessing Risks and Opportunities
- Risk and Opportunity Action
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