Risks. Assumptions. Issues. Dependencies.

Four concepts that almost every project manager has dealt with in one form or another. When managed effectively, they significantly reduce execution friction and better secure scope, schedule and budget success.

When not managed effectively, it’s like riding a bike with the brakes engaged—you may ultimately get to where you want to be, but it takes a lot more effort to get there.

Key to managing risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies (RAID) effectively is not just understanding each concept—it’s truly internalizing how the concepts interrelate. Understanding the interrelationships better positions the PM to not just manage each individual RAID component, but also to proactively address problems and avert scope, schedule or budget impacts.

To that end, my focus is to not just explain each of the RAID components, but to demonstrate the connection points between them. In my view, which I call the RAID 101 Model, the relationships look as follows:

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Alina has been Maya’s mentor for the past year. They were just about to wrap up a mentoring session at their favorite coffee shop.
“Alina, I so appreciate your being such a great mentor. You’ve helped me so much!”
“Thank you for saying that, Maya. Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” Maya said.
“Are you mentoring anyone?”
Maya paused. “…me? A mentor?”
“Uh huh.”
“I just don’t think I have the wisdom to be a mentor to anyone.”
“Why’s that?”
“I just feel like I have so much to learn,” Maya said.
“We all do. The point is, you’ve learned a lot about life that someone else might be able to benefit from. We’ve talked a lot about inner-city youth and your personal experiences with overcoming challenges in your upbringing. You’ve done an outstanding job and could really be helping others follow the same path you took.”
“I don’t know,” Maya said.
“How about you think about it, Maya. You’ve been a great mentee, and I think you could also be a great mentor in the right situation.”
“Okay, I will.” Maya got up from her chair. “Same time next month?”
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
Maya walked back to her car. “Me, a mentor?” she said to herself. It was then she thought about a young girl she met last month who reminded her a lot of her own upbringing.
“Maybe so,” she whispered as she smiled and drove off.

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Bud was one of the most brilliant people in his organization.  Only in his mid-thirties, Bud amazed his senior managers with his ability to grasp problems and develop innovative and effective solutions to those problems.  He was highly sought after as a "go-to" guy and would consistently come up with creative approaches.  His management decided to give him a thorny project with a team of over 100 professionals.  "This is my chance to really prove I can deliver", Bud thought as he willingly accepted the project.

Bud wasted no time in coming up with some great solutions which his management thought were brilliant.  Expectations were sky-high and Bud was on a project high.  Then the problems started.

I have a very good friend who is several years older than me. Aside from being a close friend, he also refers to me as his mentor. I used to cringe a bit every time he said it. I am younger than him and felt that our relative overall life experience didn’t earn me my mentor status.

I took some time to reflect on some of our discussions. I realized that there were some topical areas where I had a significant amount of experience where he had gaps. He understood that my experience filled his gaps, and didn’t consider age to be a barrier to helping him in those areas.

While neither of us were seeking a mentoring relationship, our friendship has morphed to include his mentoring of me in some areas, while I mentor him in others. We are situational mentors to each other based on experience and need.

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In my four decades as a professional, I’ve delivered many presentations and keynotes. Some went well, others totally bombed. Through my learnings about both the good and bad, I’ve identified key success factors necessary to create and deliver compelling presentations. The factors, which I call the “4 C’s of Compelling Presentations,” have helped me more effectively get my point across. Let’s dig right in…

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A number of years back I was in a meeting with two HR representatives at my company.They were explaining to me how the HR organization wanted to be more “strategic” with its clients and how they wanted to help us with annual resource planning.   At the time, our biggest problem was filling open positions with qualified candidates; a number of key positions had been open for months with no qualified candidates in the hiring pipeline. When I asked the HR reps about how they were going to help with this problem, they both told me that they didn’t have time to address the hiring issues because they were tasked with being more “strategic”.  Needless to say, the meeting went downhill in a hurry because the HR reps were more interested in fulfilling the HR organization’s “be strategic” mandate than they were in helping me with my real-life problem. 

Excerpted from The Truth about Getting Your Point Across…and Nothing But the Truth

Unless you excused yourself for whatever reason you were there for at least fifteen minutes listening to his philosophy.  The problem was that Moe was friends with the person managing our contract so we had to put up with him.