It’s forever been a mystery to me, but programme steering committees always seem to want to talk about risks instead of issues. Logic would suggest that the thing that is biting the programme’s bum is probably more important than the thing that might, but if risks have a poor cousin, it’s definitely issues. And that’s a real shame for the programme, because risks don’t kill programmes. They become issues and then they do.
Issues are a bit like blood in medical science. We can tell a lot about the human body simply by examining the blood. The same is true of issues and programmes. What kinds of issues are occurring? Could they have been avoided through better planning? What is the overall volume of issues? Is that volume increasing or decreasing? What’s the cycle time (the duration from identification to resolution)? Is that cycle time increasing or decreasing? Are these issues causing slippage/critical path impact, and if so, how much? These are all good questions to ask by default, so we always recommend that clients build them into the overall programme governance and skip the futility of ‘the top 5 issues’ altogether.
If you really want to go for bonus points though, there are three things that an exec sponsor can look at that will really give insight into the health of issue management.
1.
Take a look at the closed issues. Was there a sound rationale for closing them? Were they really resolved or did the countdown just expire (complete with attendant slippage and cost) without them ever having been addressed?
2.
Cross-refer issues with the risk register. Did the issues start life as risks? If yes, was enough done to prevent from morphing into issues? If instead they started life as issues, is the programme’s early warning working as well as it should?
3.
Can you find an ant-trail between the issue log and the plan? A programme’s ability to deliver comes down to executing every day on its plan. The reactive stuff – in the form of issues – is what stops that from happening. So as soon as the corrective action for an issue is known, it should go into the plan, and the issue can be closed as soon as the action is complete. That’s how a programme remains off the back foot and on the front foot.