Risk Management Uncertainty Project Environments

Unforeseen disruptions can affect everything from technical feasibility to market timing, cost, and financial performance. Project risk has a very dynamic nature, in the sense that risks which eventually cause performance problems often have cascading and compounding effects on projects. Here are a few project risk management strategies that can help you succeed in a competitive business environment, despite these negative potentialities:

Identify & deal with contingencies early

A contingency is a condition that occurs when uncertainties emerge with the potential to impact a project. Once you have identified a contingency, it is helpful to categorize the associated risk with defined impacts. This will give you a basis for communicating the degree of risk impact with your project team. Category-1 risks might mean no impact on project performance, category-2 risks might mean impact on task or project subsystems only, and category-3 risks might stand for impact on project performance. In either case, it is important to know that only risks on the project's critical path can be category-3 risks. Using project management software can help you make this assessment, in your own projects.

Assess feasibility early & frequently

Feasibility analysis tools such as concept tests, focus groups, and prototype trials can serve very well as means to detect risks and treat them early on in a project's life cycle. Adequate feasibility analyses will allow 

you to think through contingencies in your projects, as well as mold and shape your development strategies. By guiding the progress of your projects with frequent feasibility analyses, you will lower the risk of poor usability and design by continuously integrating your clients' feedback into the development cycles of your projects.

Combine quantitative & qualitative risk MGT

With the help of project risk management software, we have become effective at identifying and dealing with risks that can be described quantitatively. But while quantitative methods provide an important tool set for project risk management, it also takes the collective thinking and collaboration of all project team members and stakeholders to identify and address the complexity of risks in today's business environment. To strengthen the qualitative side of your project risk management, engage in review meetings, brainstorming, focus groups, and other activities with your project team/stakeholders.
 

To conclude, we've discussed several project risk management strategies, which included identifying contingencies early, conducting frequent feasibility analyses, and complementing quantitative approaches with people-oriented approaches. It has become clear that some organizations are more successful than others in dealing with project environment risks. By investing the necessary time and energy into your project team, and into learning and applying these methods.

Calendar Printing Project

The most obvious fact to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is not in the end user's hands before January 1, 2014, they may already have found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the user's hands close to the start of school if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a good timeline for the entire project.

Calendar printing can be broken down into four activities: planning, production, marketing, and distribution. Since we are working backwards, we'll start with distribution.

Distributing your Printed Calendars

How are you getting your calendars into the end user's hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just need to make sure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a local mail house handle mailing the calendars - it will probably be cheaper and easier for you. Just make sure you find out from the printer or mail house how much extra time they will need and factor it in.

If, on the other hand, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more complicated. How much time you need for sales depends on your sales strategy. Are you selling at a local festival or other event? If so, then that gives you a deadline, but keep in mind that you'll be better off if you can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one event are not what you expect. Or maybe you are having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you should allow at least two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.

Calendars make great Christmas gifts. If that is part of your sales plan, then remember that if you make your calendar available the week before Christmas, many people will already have finished much of their Christmas shopping. If you can start selling right after Thanksgiving, however, then you can catch the early shoppers as well as the last-minute gift-buyers. Of course giving yourself even more sales time is always a good idea. Many of our most successful fundraisers begin selling the calendars as early as September.

Are you selling calendars online? (We can help with that!) If so, then you will need to allow for shipping time. That means that for Christmas gifts, you will want to have most of your calendars sold by about December 15th, otherwise your buyers will have to pay for expedited shipping. You need to allow enough time for people to find your calendar online, so you would probably want to have your calendar available for sale online by about mid-November.

Or maybe your are selling calendars in retail locations. If so, talk to your retailers early. You will probably find out that they prefer to have their Christmas merchandise in hand by the 1st of September or even sooner. That way they can keep shelves full as they remove Summer items. Chain retailers such as the major booksellers may want calendars in hand as soon as July, so that they can warehouse them and distribute them to their own locations. Also, check with retailers about packaging and labeling requirements - they may need your calendars to be shrink-wrapped and to include ISBN bar codes.

 Marketing Your Calendar

If you print a calendar that you plan to sell, you should be sure to develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Marketing does not have to add to the overall duration of the calendar project - you can and should begin marketing during the planning and production stages of the project. However, if you wait to start marketing until you have the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow at least a few extra weeks, maybe more, for your marketing message to reach the intended audience and motivate them to buy.

Calendar Print Production

The production phase of a calendar printing project starts when you hand off all of the images, text, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Make sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Year box, it is usually about three weeks (sometimes sooner if you have a particular deadline). If you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you should probably allow a little extra time - maybe a month in total - for production.

The Calendar Planning Stage

The calendar printing planning stage includes everything that comes before the hand off to the printer. Some planning items will take time. First and foremost, assemble a team. The more people who invest their time in your calendar the more successful it will be. You will need to gather artwork. If you have photos already and you just need to sort through them, that's great. If you need to solicit photos or hold a photo or art contest (we can help with that!), then you will need to allow extra time for that. A contest may need time to run as well as time to market so that you have adequate participation. You also need to gather everything else that goes in the calendar, possibly including date information, captions, logos, mission statement, letter from the director/president/minister, etc.

Will your calendar include advertising? If so, then you will need to make sure that someone (or better yet a team) contacts businesses to sell them advertising space and collects advertising artwork from them. Sometimes advertising artwork is as simple as a business card, but other times it can take longer than expected to collect all the advertising artwork. Make sure you allow plenty of time for this.

So, how soon should you start working on it if you need to print a calendar that is customized to your specifications? That all depends. If you have everything ready for your printer and distribution will be a simple hand-out, then three to four weeks lead time may be sufficient. If, however, you have to assemble a team, collect photos and text, sell advertising, plan a marketing campaign, organize sales teams, and/or place calendars in retail stores, then you'll need to work backwards and figure out how much time you really need.

Aquaponics Project sustainable Food Production System

Aquaponics or pisciponics, is a sustainable food production system that combines traditional aquaculture (raising aquatic animals such as snails, fish, crayfish or prawns in tanks) with hydroponics (cultivating plants in water) in a symbiotic environment. In aquaculture, effluents accumulate in the water, increasing toxicity for the fish. This water is led to a hydroponic system where the by-products from the aquaculture are broken down by nitrogen fixing bacteria, then filtered out by the plants as vital nutrients, after which the cleansed water is recirculated back to the animals.

Clifford Chin has a small aquaponics project in Charlotte, NC. He says:
"It's like growing plants on steroids," said Chin. "The vegetables grow three to four times faster than what you put in the ground. You can actually eat here on Friday and come back on Monday and see the difference in size."

Environmentally the basic idea is to have a closed system in which the fish eat the plants. The wastes excreted by the fish are converted by microbes and bacteria into a nutrient that is consumed by the plants. The plants then are eaten by the fish. This is environmentally good and sustainable but has no advantage since neither the fish nor the plants could be eaten by humans to remain sustainable. The modified aquaponics model is to feed the fish with an external supply of food. The fish grow and at the same time excrete wastes that are converted to plant nutrients that grow the plants that are also eaten by humans. The advantage is that we get fish to eat and the nutrients from the fish waste efficiently grows plant food that we can eat. All of this without the use of chemical fertilizers.

There are several disadvantages to this model:

Sustainability of the system depends on the sustainability of the feed for the fish. Efficient fish growing requires specially formulated feed. The wastes produced by the fish in a closed aquaponic system go to the feeding of the plants in the system. The plants are to be eaten by humans not the fish.

It requires growing fish in a recirculating environment that is connected to the plant growing environment. This is not a simple or inexpensive process. If the climate is not suitable for the fish the process must be grown indoors and that requires energy to maintain the proper temperatures.

A proper balance must be maintained between the amount of fish in the system producing the wastes that provide the nutrients for the plants and the amount of plants needed in the system to maintain proper water quality. This balance is not always easy to determine.

Growing plants in liquid requires more labor than growing plants in the ground. The faster growth in a liquid environment, however, may partially offset the extra labor required.

A better model is to grow the fish in the most efficient manner possible. Efficient means growing the fish in an environment that assures the best feed conversion ratios possible, the lowest energy requirements and high survivability. The feed conversion ratio is the amount of feed required to produce a pound of fish. The growing environment must also allow for the capture and removal of the fish wastes from the water. A recirculating environment is the most efficient fish growing environment achieving very low feed conversion rations and low energy costs.

The manure from the fish can be captured and removed from the water in these systems. The manure is de-watered and dried to about 65% moisture. It is then combined with a carbon source, inoculants and a small amount of clay and decomposed in a controlled process into humus compost. The resulting humus compost is a complete organic fertilizer that can be stored and shipped anywhere for growing organic crops.

Humus compost is a more efficient form of compost. More organic matter is bound to the clay particles and will not be converted into carbon dioxide as is the case with regular compost. The organic matter in a recirculating aquaponic system will also decompose into carbon dioxide in a few months. Humus compost is a better form of the fish nutrients and it also makes a smaller carbon footprint since more carbon is sequestered in the soil when humus compost is used.

The consistency of the final fertilizer product is coloidal and putty-like. It is moist and will form a ball if compressed. It will readily mix in water and will form a uniform liquid with suspended particles. The liquid can be pumped through a hydroponic system or sprayed on crops or soil. The solid form can applied to the soil as well.

Since the fish production process has been separated from the plant growing process a complex balancing act is not needed. The amount of organic fertilizer needed in the form of the humus compost made from the decomposed fish manure can be determined for any quantity of plants for any location. The fertilizer can be delivered and applied.

This model is more sustainable, environmentally advantageous and healthier than growing chickens, beef or pork. The feed conversion ratio in a re-circulating environment is 1.6 or less. For chickens the ratio is 2 and for beef as high as 10.

There are also many health benefits from eating fish. Most fish feeds are grain based with fish meal or other fish related products added. Some of the organic fertilizer produced in the above described process could be used to grow the grain. The use of the organic fertilizer would further improve Aquaponics the sustainablilty of the system.

Implements Online Project Management Tools

 Online comprehensive project management tools to be successful. In the days before the Internet, even the most comprehensive management tools were limited by time and space. If the project coordinator at the main office made a change to the schedule or manpower estimates, then it would take at least a day for that information to get to the site foreman. But with online project management tools, those updates can happen instantly.

Before a company implements online project management tools, it is important that the company understand all of the features which are available. For example, the whiteboard feature can be something which allows a project coordinator and a site manager to exchange drawings and notes in real time. It literally shrinks the distance between the office and the site down to nothing.

If a project is a large internal project, then online project management tools can be used to organize groups and keep the project running smoothly. Once a coordinator gets an understanding of how to create and organize groups in an online piece of coordinating software, then it becomes much easier to assign tasks and keep up with the personnel in each group. The coordinator can tell which groups are doing their jobs and which groups are having problems meeting deadlines.

The great thing about good online project management tools is that each group leader can be an admin in the system, which allows the leaders to make changes and post any notes regarding their group's progress. At the same time, the coordinator can create protected areas where only authorized personnel can access records that are important to the project. It is a great way of improving the flow of information within a project while still keeping the critical information confidential.

In order to properly manage a project calendar and budget, it makes sense to try and get updated information in real-time. When interactive online software is used to coordinate a project, it makes it very easy to keep data current. Internet project coordination keeps all groups informed of any updates to project specs and it also helps the coordinator to make important decisions using accurate and up to date information. It will help to cut down on the costs of doing any kind of project because it will significantly expand the efficiency of any work crew and the management team that is monitoring the project.