The MGRUSH meeting risk assessment method comes from answering a series of questions about a project, its stakeholders, and meeting participants. Our meeting risk assessment method is based on project risk assessment work completed by F. Warren McFarlan and James McKenney of Harvard Business School.

Meeting risk should be assessed for every major session. Use the MGRUSH Meeting Risk Assessment tool during your preparation activities.

What is Risk?

Risk derives from exposure to the following:

• Failure to achieve benefits
• Higher implementation costs
• Longer implementation time
• Performance that is less than expected

While risk is not “bad” — failure to manage risk becomes dangerous.

Meeting Risk Defined

Meeting risk appears at three layers:

Business — Project — Technique

1. Business risk represents the exposure to an incomplete or late project.
2. Project risk represents the likelihood of missing timelines, falling short of delivery standards, or grossly exceeding cost estimates.
3. Technique risk represents the potential for major problems caused by a specific procedure or tool (ie, meeting design).

Meeting Risk Components

The Meeting Risk Assessment tool provides a method of measuring meeting risk using four vectors:

Size — Politics — Complexity — Diversity

• Size—

. . . indicates the overall project size measured by effort, scope, and quantity of meetings and workshops. Project size affects planning and coordinating the required information needed to support the project. Questions cover work hours, duration, the number of sessions, the number of different types of sessions (i.e., how many different agendas are required), and whether you are located at high-level planning or detailed design in your life cycle. Therefore, the larger the project, the greater the potential risk when holding group meetings or sessions. Consequently, you need to know that size can be a significant driver of risk and thus structure your sessions appropriately (such as assigning a more experienced session leader or a team of session leaders).

• Complexity—

. . . is an indication of the structure of the business and the volatility of the information required to support the deliverable. Therefore, it measures how difficult it will be to specify and organize the information exchange. Questions cover the newness of the topic, whether the solution is a replacement or new (i.e., evergreen), engineering or process complexity, the extent of changes required for both internal and external customers, environmental changes required, and acceptance of the methods. Because the more complex an existing system is or the newer a business is, the more difficult it is to specify its requirements. Complexity and newness often lead to incomplete or vague requirements. Consequently, adjustments may include building more thorough agendas or using prototyping for some of the needs and requirements gathering.

• Politics—

. . . is an indication of the political and personality climate of a project. Therefore, highly political groups tend to cloud the issues at hand and make sessions more difficult. Questions cover rating the attitudes of customers (internal or external), management, and participants; commitment of upper management; the level of controversy; past cooperation between customers and staff; the amount of flexibility allowed the participants; and stability of the organizations involved. Because highly political organizations or unstable organizations (i.e., numerous reorganizations) can make gathering requirements difficult (cutting through the ‘unknowns’) or short-lived (the participants won’t assume ownership when finished). Consequently, political risk is reduced by using the MGRUSH Professional Facilitation technique. The solution requires a politically savvy session leader and extensive planning to gain management commitment and proper resources.

• Customer Organization (ie, heterogeneity)—

. . . is an indicator of the nature and familiarity of the organization. Furthermore, diversity looks at the participants’ ability to cooperate with each other and the logistics involved in getting everyone together. Questions cover the number of departments, the number of participants, the location of participants (geographical, domestic, and international), their prior experience working together (if any), and the knowledge of both the participants and the project team. Because, if an organization is cooperative and has few political axes to grind, yet is located around the country and the world, it will be more difficult to prepare for the sessions as well as to schedule everyone for the workshops. Consequently, it becomes expensive to bring people from many sites to one location—especially if the estimated workshop duration is incorrect. Therefore, this type of risk calls for a session leader who has experience with logistics and estimating meeting duration.

When To Assess

Assess meeting risk for every important session. Complete the assessment as part of your initial preparation. Then reassess meeting risk for each stage or phase gate meeting, decision review, or look-back. If meeting risk is not going down as you move through the project life cycle, your meetings may become trouble.

Mitigating Meeting Risk

Discovering that a meeting is high risk alone is insufficient. You must do something to manage the risk. Here are some tips:

High Complexity

• Have a speaker (not you) stimulate the participants with ideas to drive creativity and inspire innovation.

High Politics

• Develop consensus by building vision with leadership. Conduct a leadership workshop to write down the purpose, scope, objectives, and vision for the new business, product, or process.

Large Project

• Conduct four to five requirements gathering workshops. Then conduct a review with senior management to see what needs adjustment.

Diverse Organization

• Schedule numerous face-to-face visits or conference calls during your preparation.

Meeting Risk Factors Estimation

With Excel, we use 38 questions to assess risk which creates a score from 1 to 100 (high risk). Contact us for details and the scales for each question. We can also send you the risk analysis file to conduct your own calculations.

Project Size

Size factors measure the overall project size of effort, scope, and number of workshops. Therefore, helps determine risk due to the complexity of planning and coordinating large projects and the resources they consume.

1. Work Hours: Total work hours (1,000s) for the project?

2. Duration: What is the project’s duration?

3. Number Projects: Number of other projects supporting the program?

4. Dependency: Is there another project on which this project is likely or totally dependent?

5. Stakeholders: How many stakeholder types will use the new solution?

6. Workshop Quantity: Estimated number of workshops for the entire project?

7. Workshop Types: How many different types of workshops will be held?

8. Beginning Phase: In which phase are you starting?

Complexity 

Complexity factors measure the structure of the business, its volatility, and requirements. Therefore, this measures how tough it will be to understand the requirements.

1. Project Type: The project may best be described as (i.e., a planning session), a replacement for a process or product, a change to an existing process or product, or a new process or product.

2. Replacement Percentage: What percentage of activities can be replaced on a one-to-one basis?

3. Project Complexity: From an engineering point of view, what is the degree of complexity of the project?

4. Changes: How severe are the changes with the project?

5. First Time: Are the proposed methods the first of the kind for the project team?

6. First for Business: Are the proposed methods the first of the kind for the business?

7. Business Acceptance: Will the business accept the new methods for developing the requirements?

8. Team Acceptance: Will the project team readily accept the new methods for developing the requirements?

9. New Technology: Is new or unfamiliar technology needed?

10. Success Dependent: Does the project’s success depend on new technology?

12. Outside Purchase: Are purchased or outside sources being used?

13. Vendor Support: How solid is vendor support with the outside purchases?

Political Factors

The political factors show the personality and climate around the project.

1. Business Attitude: What is the mindset of the business?

2. Management: How committed is upper management to the project?

3. Controversy: What is the level of controversy around the requirements?

4. Participant Level: What is the job level of the participants?

5. Cooperative Users: How cooperative are groups with each other?

6. Flexibility: The participants have how much flexibility in making the final decision?

7. Processing Flexibility: The participants have how much flexibility in making the process design?

8. Design Flexibility: The participants have how much flexibility during detailed design?

9. Stability: How stable is the organization?

Heterogeneity 

The heterogeneity factors show the diversity and nature of the business. These factors look at the ability of the business to cooperate in coordinating all the stakeholders.

1. Number of Units: Number of departments (other than the project team) involved with the project?

2. Participants: Number of participants?

3. Locations: Number of geographical sites?

4. Multinational: What is the range of multinationals?

5. Prior Experience: Have the participants ever worked on a project together before?

6. Business Change: Must the business change to meet the requirements of the project solution?

7. Project Knowledge: How knowledgeable is the business in the area of the project process?

8. Business Knowledge: How knowledgeable are the subject matter experts in the process?

9. Team Knowledge: How knowledgeable is the project team about the solution?

Meeting Risk Summary

Of the four areas, Size and Politics provide the most concern, and then Complexity and Diversity.

Meeting Risk Assessment supports understanding the sources of risk. Contact MGRUSH for a quantitative Meeting Risk Assessment tool. We developed it in along with Dr. Howard Rubin (developer of ESTIMACS). Or, see your MGRUSH alumni links to access the EXCEL file that speeds up calculations and risk estimates.

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