5 Ways to use RAID Logs for Project Reviews
Did you know you can improve the efficiency of your project meetings by using RAID Logs for project reviews?
RAID logs are a critical project portfolio management (PPM) tool, used extensively by project managers to structure their meetings. Inadequate risk management can significantly influence the trajectory of project delivery, and make inordinate demands on your time, resources, and budget.
PMO365’s RAID log has inbuilt processes to pre-empt problems that threaten to derail delivery. Project managers also find it incredibly useful for focussing project reviews on the most pressing matters. Here are five ways that PMO365’s RAID Logs contribute to efficient project meetings:
1. Embedded RAID Logs for Project Reviews
Risks are potential problems which have been identified by project managers. In other words, they could become issues at some point in the project’s lifecycle. RAID Logs identify the four main categories of risk management: risks, issues, assumptions, and dependencies.
Identifying each of these categories in project planning is a proactive approach which limits the likelihood and the potential damage of threats to successful delivery.
RAID Logs are embedded in PMO365, which means risk management information is accessible to every feature of its PPM Solution. Instant status updates and key reporting metrics heightens visibility in PMO365’s RAID logs, which makes large portfolios of projects significantly more manageable.
PMO365’s RAID Logs also store all the risk data and actions from previous projects for easy reference. Current projects are directly informed by the successes and the learnings of other projects.
PMO365 logs may be customised for any enterprise’s requirements. And, when used collaboratively, greatly improve discussion and rigour around risk.
The result? Project review meetings are both efficient and effective, with all the most up-to-date RAID information you need close to hand.
2. Clearly Defined and Categorised Risks
PMO365 provides greater visibility around project vulnerabilities, and recognises similarities between current projects and risks identified in past projects. PMO365’s Risk Management app has the capability to determine the severity of risks by plotting the probability of its occurrence on a matrix against the potential impact on the business.
When the severity of a risk is determined, an appropriate risk response is recommended. This will include measures to avoid the risk, or accept the risk to some degree, or mitigate the risk, or transfer the risk to a third party.
This kind of detail means you can come to project reviews armed with full knowledge of potential issues and responses.
3. Allocated Responsibilities in RAID Logs for Project Reviews
Good risk management is reliant on effective monitoring. PMO365 allocates every risk to an individual ‘owner’ who is responsible for monitoring and responding with an agreed plan of action if required. When risks are interconnected or highly technical in nature they may need a suitably qualified owner to be responsible for them.
When responsibility is established, the organisation’s preparation and response to risk can be properly evaluated. PMO365 prompts managers to log decisions made, accountability, justifications, duration, and the nature of each action. This promotes greater productivity and accountability within every project team and means that project review meetings need only include those employees directly relevant to the current discussion.
4. Assumptions and Prioritisations
All projects require estimations and strategies to guide them. This inevitably involves a number of assumptions which, if adequately monitored, can minimise the damage a project may be subject to. Therefore, PMO365 also logs assumptions, and triggers notifications when certain assumptions appear to be incorrect.
Recording assumption data means that everyone participating in a project review will be clear on which information is based on assumption, and which is based on known fact. As a result, more informed and better decision-making becomes a feature of all project reviews.
Over time, the nature of dependencies between risks, issues or assumptions becomes clearer. As risks are minimised, issues are resolved, or assumptions are ultimately confirmed, the priority of risks change. These changes are automatically updated in PMO365. Risk severity potential and priorities of risks are instantaneously adjusted to reflect the current situation.
Consequently, your risk management portfolio becomes more accurate and informative over time. On top of that, the institutional knowledge acquired from completed projects provides essential guidance for all future project methodologies.
5. Up to Date Information and Metrics
PMO365 is an integrated environment that maintains all real-time project portfolio data in a single, secure location.
Accordingly, RAID log data is part of an enterprise-wide system that identifies problems and suggests strategic interventions before issues start to cause problems elsewhere. Changes to any aspect of a project or program is reflected across the organisation. Furthermore, clear ownership of risk management from the start ensures the right response every time and forms a clear chain of authority for escalations.
In practice, integrated data gives every project stakeholder access to the very latest reporting and metrics, and timely notifications to help guide and monitor delivery.
How PMO365 Presents RAID Logs for Project Reviews
Risk management is always a key topic of discussion at a project review. Your PMO365 RAID Log ensures productive and meaningful consideration of all the potential factors at play. In one centralised database, you have:
- A list of risks, in a prioritised order, categorised and assigned to a team member.
- All issues, with information on their current status and how they are being managed.
- All assumptions that may be influencing your risk management strategies.
- All actions that have been taken and how they impact your project.
- All dependencies between risks, updated instantaneously with real time data.
- And all decisions made through the project’s progression, with their effectiveness evaluated.
Now, project meetings can be spent addressing the topics which really demand attention. With PMO365 you are improving the rigour and success rate of your project portfolio overall.
See how PMO365 can improve your risk management strategies with greater consistency and visibility across the entire organisation. Book a demo here.
PMO365: The Project Management Office on your Microsoft 365 cloud.
IIR: Introduce, Integrate, Replace
Step 01
Introduce
You cannot run a portfolio on Excel and PowerPoint alone.
Project portfolio management is the discipline of seeing every project in one place, prioritising the work that matters, allocating people against demand, and governing delivery with real numbers. It is not optional at any serious scale. The moment you have more projects than one person can hold in their head, you need a single, current view of status, schedule, cost, resource and risk.
Excel and PowerPoint feel free because there is no licence conversation. The real cost is elsewhere. It is the hours spent maintaining workbooks, the version confusion, and the numbers that go stale the moment they are pasted.
A spreadsheet cannot tell you, on demand, which projects are at risk, where your people are over-committed next quarter, or how much of the portfolio budget is actually spent.
Introducing a proper PPM platform is the first step. Not to add another tool for its own sake, but to give the portfolio one place where the data lives together and stays live.
Step 02
Integrate
The instinct after buying a PPM platform is to make everyone move into it. That is the fastest way to fail. Project managers already have tools they trust, and finance already has systems of record. Force a migration on day one and you get resistance, shadow spreadsheets, and a dataset nobody believes.
Integrate first. Meet the data where it already is. Two directions matter.
Direction 01
Enterprise systems
Connect to the finance or ERP layer so actuals, commitments and budgets flow in automatically. Reporting stops being a monthly reconciliation and becomes a live view. Nobody rekeys a spend figure again.
Direction 02
The tools PMs already use
The direction most platforms neglect, and arguably the more important. The portfolio should read from the PM's own tools, not force people to abandon them.
The reason this matters is simple. That data is already there, and it is kept current by the person closest to it. When the portfolio reads directly from these sources, the status report updates itself. No chasing, no copy and paste, no reporting lag. The PM keeps working the way they always have, and the board gets a live picture as a side effect.
Step 03
Replace
Integration buys you two things: trust, and live data. Once both are in place, you look at what can go.
Every organisation carries tools and spreadsheets that either do not do the job well or carry a heavy maintenance overhead. The classic example is the resource spreadsheet. It is a workbook someone maintains by hand to track who is on what. It is always slightly out of date, owned by one person, and impossible to reconcile against real demand.
Replace it with the equivalent function in your PPM.
A proper demand management capability does what the spreadsheet was reaching for, with none of the overhead. It models demand against capacity across the whole portfolio, updates as projects shift, and needs no manual upkeep.
Replace deliberately, one function at a time, and only after the platform has earned it. The test is simple: if a spreadsheet is high overhead or low quality, and the platform does the same job natively, retire the spreadsheet.
The payoff
You stop producing reports and start reading them
Follow IIR and the nature of reporting changes. The status view is current because it is fed by the tools people already use and the systems that already hold the money. The overhead that used to consume the last week of every month disappears, because there is nothing to assemble.
That is the whole point of real-time reporting. Not a prettier deck, but a portfolio you can look at any day of the month and trust, at a fraction of the effort it takes today.
Built on Microsoft 365. Native ground for IIR.
pmo365 integrates with the tools your teams already run in, so the path from Introduce to Integrate to Replace is a natural progression rather than a rip and replace.