Understanding Risks Through Links to Your Project’s Triple Constraints

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Newsletter Picture (1920 x 1080 px)To make good, informed decisions both before and during a project, stakeholders have to really understand the project’s risks. One approach is to describe the impact of each risk to one or more of the project constraints—scope, time, or cost. Linking risks to the triple constraints provides the following benefits:

  • Meaningful descriptions of potential impacts. A description of risk impact like “creates more complexity” or “strains a resource” might not mean much to most stakeholders. But a cost, time, or scope impact statement makes the risk’s potential effect universally understood. It can also help resolve debates between stakeholders with competing scope ideas. In addition to debating business benefits, stakeholders can discuss the potential impact of the different scopes to facilitate a more balanced discussion.
  • Expanded risk identification. Anything that inspires thinking about potential risks is worthwhile. Asking questions like “What circumstances could increase our costs?” or “What could happen that would increase build time?” can identify more risks. This simple but different way of thinking might identify risks the team might not consider otherwise.
  • Risk prioritization. There is usually a priority to the triple constraints. For example, if a legal requirement must be met by a specific date, time and scope become higher priorities than cost. If the budget is tight and a quick fix is desired, the project priorities would be cost and scope. Categorizing risks by how they impact the triple constraints ensures that risks are handled in alignment with organizational priorities. This means that resources like contingency funds or skilled experts can be allocated appropriately to address the most critical risks.
  • Demonstrate overall project risk. Assigning the overall project risk as high, medium, or low doesn’t say much. Instead, describing the risk level for scope, time, and cost facilitates better decision-making about the project. It also enables better project portfolio management. Examining each project’s time, cost, and scope risk is a straightforward way to compare the viability of one project versus another.

Take one of your past or present projects and have a go at linking their risks to the project constraints. Does it help identify other risks? Are the impacts easier to understand?

For more about risk management, check out Bob McGannon’s Project Management Foundations: Risk course.

 

Coming Up

A day in the life of a project manager can seem like an endless parade of problems, which can turn almost anyone into a pessimist. Reframing problems into opportunities and a sincere search for solutions can significantly improve performance: yours, your team’s, and your projects’. Join Jason Mackenzie and I for Office Hours on Wednesday, May 7, 2025 at 9am MT, we’ll discuss how positive reframing can improve communication and results at all levels. Click here to join!

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 89,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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How to Speed Up a Tardy Team 

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Newsletter Graphic Advice The PM is INDear Bonnie,

I have a problem with delivering on schedule. My technical team eventually gets their job done, but it takes them forever to complete anything. How can I light a fire under them so I can complete my projects more quickly, and more importantly, on time?

Signed, Is it done yet?

 

Dear Is it done yet,

Ah yes, the elusive on-time tech team—known to inhabit the wilds of your organization like a snuggle of sloths: adorable and clearly not in a rush. (I looked it up. That cute curled up pile of sloths is called a snuggle.)

Let’s start with a revolutionary concept: maybe they aren’t a snuggle but, rather, a scurry of squirrels (yup, checked that one too) doing other stuff. You’re teed off that your project is moving slower than a sloth on a NyQuil drip, while they could be buried by higher priority acorns that someone (probably with more clout and an intimidating glare) told them to finish first. Try asking them nicely what’s going on and, even better, if there’s anything you can do to clear their path. Bribing them with nutty snacks can’t hurt.

Next, remember that tech teams are usually zip-tying the entire infrastructure together while fending off the latest “urgent” request from someone who yells and also thinks their mouse is a dysfunctional laser pointer. If your project is languishing on the “once the network stops crashing” list, you have two options: yell louder than the others (not recommended) or consider hiring a contractor whose job it is to care about your project because you’re paying them to.

And finally, the nuclear option: sponsors. You know, the people who can send a single email, which prompts the team to act like they’re in a Red Bull commercial. If your project has real value (at least in your opinion), get your sponsor involved. Nothing lights a fire under a slothful tech team like a VP breathing down their neck like a caffeinated Komodo dragon. If your team is scurrying, you can earn their everlasting loyalty by coaxing your sponsor to protect your team’s time and sanity like a mama bear warding off unreasonably demanding stakeholders.

Good luck! If all else fails, you can say that the delays are part of your “iterative process.”

Cheers,

Bonnie

I sincerely apologize to any species I’ve offended by omitting them from the metaphors in this article.

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 89,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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Helping Your Sponsor to Be More Helpful

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3 sponsor effectiveness

Sponsors often aren’t effective because they don’t know what to do besides kick off a project. Here are things you can do to help your sponsor be more helpful to the project.

  • Facilitate meetings with influential stakeholders. First, you analyze stakeholders to determine the project’s most influential ones. Set up small group or 1-on-1 meetings with those stakeholders and the sponsor, prioritizing those with the most influence. Prepare an agenda and review it with the sponsor in advance, helping the sponsor develop appropriate messaging for each session. Note: Some of the most critical meetings could be with influential stakeholders who aren’t engaged in the project but should be. If possible, set up meetings with those stakeholders as well.
  • Recommend creating a steering committee. An ideal sponsor has the necessary funding, control over project resources, and the business process and technical skills to guide the project manager and team members. It’s rare for an individual to have all of these, but a sponsorship committee with more than one person can. If the individual sponsor hasn’t realized that they need support, you can recommend a steering committee with that person as chairperson – and they act as the public-facing sponsor. You can also draft terms of engagement for the sponsorship committee, prepare agendas, and take minutes to support the sponsor.
  • Help the sponsor communicate adjustments to the project vision. Things change as projects progress. Approved project changes can change scope. With agile, the project’s direction can change substantially as business and technical team members learn from each other and the products they create. Project managers or scrum leaders can work proactively with sponsors (or product owners) to keep their understanding up to date and help them communicate effectively with key stakeholders.
  • Help assess and adjust work priorities. Most project teams work against an ongoing battle of priorities. Team members typically have day-to-day operational responsibilities to fulfill with project duties allocated on top of those. Yet, they rarely get clear guidance on what to work on when. Prioritization of project vs. operational work is left to the individual project team member. To manage the schedule, project managers can collect data and inform sponsors about the planned versus actual hours people dedicate to the project. Once the sponsor has this data, they are usually more willing to work with the project manager and team members to determine whether operational and project work priorities support business needs or whether adjustments are needed.

Do you have any tips for making a sponsor more helpful to the project? Or need advice for working with a challenging sponsor? Share with us in the comments section.

For more about sponsors, check out Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez’s How to Be an Effective Project Sponsor course.

 

Coming Up

Looking to set up agile projects for success, as well as creating custom fields to track elements unique to the agile project method. My updated Agile Project Management with Microsoft Project course has been published! Click here to watch.

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 88,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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GanttPro: Another Online PM Tool That’s Worth a Look

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Newsletter Picture (1920 x 1080 px)I took a look at GanttPro, an online project management tool that isn’t covered in my LinkedIn Learning course. It’s a medium-level PM tool at a competitive price. It offers quite a few features without bombarding you with a suite of applications like some other products. While it lacks some things most PMs would want, they have links on their website asking for suggestion. Here’s a quick overview of what it can do.

Note: I spent about a day experimenting, so I might have missed a few things. I found their help videos and knowledge base quite good when I needed them.

  • Setup. Getting started is super simple. Create an account and it asks you if you want to create a project. You can start from scratch or use one of their templates (categories like consulting, construction, software development, product launch, web design and more). Use “By methodology” to choose either an agile or waterfall template. And when you click the Create new project button, you’ll see the Gantt chart.
  • Create project Gantt charts. It’s called GanttPro, so of course it has a Gantt chart feature. It’s easy to add tasks, subtasks, and milestones. You can indent and outdent to build your task outline. And you can drag tasks around to reorder the list. Or import tasks from an Excel file or Microsoft Project. 
  • Create task dependencies. With GanttPro, you can drag from task bar to task bar to create dependencies, or you can add the Predecessor field to the Gantt table to specify them with task IDs. GanttPro supports all four types of dependencies (FS, SS, FF, SF). Clicking a dependency in the chart opens a dialog box for adding lag or lead. When you change task dates, GanttPro recalculates the schedule.
  • Add other task info. The Gantt chart table starts with basic fields like task name and assigned resources. GanttPro has other fields like priority, duration, start and end date, budget, actual cost, status and more. Custom fields come in all the usual data types, although they are simplistic and sadly (at least for me) without formulas. If you need to make the same type of changes to multiple tasks, click the Checkmark icon just above the Gantt chart table. GanttPro tracks the history of your past actions so you can undo previous steps. (Click the clock face icon at the very top right of the window. Then, you can select an action to see the project before that action was performed.)
  • Manage resources. You can send emails to invite your team to your GanttPro environment. There are also virtual resources to represent roles, skills, materials, costs. You can assign cost rates to resources, a project calendar, or a personal calendar for specific resources. It indicates resource overallocations with a red person icon in the Gantt table as well as in the Workload view.
  • Track time. There’s a time tracker for logging time spent on assignments. People can run a timer as they work, or they can enter hours after the fact.

2 GanttPro workload

 

  • Display scheduling features. You can save baselines and then display the current schedule compared to the baseline, as shown below. You can also click buttons at the top to display the critical path, show overdue tasks, or expand or collapse the list. Say you have people who want to see status, but you don’t want them to see all the dirty laundry. In GanttPro, a filtered view shows what you want to show your client. Then, you can create a shared private link to that filtered view, so anyone with the link has view-only access to it.
  • More views. Like other software, it has Board, List, Calendar, Workload, and Dashboard views. As you navigate through the tool, you’ll sometimes see a “Missing a feature?” link, so you can cast your vote for new functionality.

2 GanttPro chart w workload

  • View status with reports and a dashboard. There isn’t a lot of reporting: it boils down to filtering tasks with different criteria. When you open the Reports screen and click Reports under development, you can tell GanttPro what types of reports you want. The Dashboard has widgets that you can turn on or off and reorganize, but you can’t create your own.
  • Manage budgets and portfolios. With estimates and actual costs, you can track income and expenses in projects. Like other tools, this cost management might not satisfy accounting nerds, but it’s a start. GanttPro doesn’t have any integration with other financial apps either. You can add projects to different portfolios and then review them with a portfolio Gantt chart, List, Workload, and Dashboard view. 

2 GanttPro dashboard

  • Communicate with the team. People involved with projects, whether internal or external to your organization, can collaborate by commenting, mentioning people, and attaching files. Click a task to open the side panel and then leave a comment or click Attach files. @mentioning works the usual way. You can also create a link to the task when you want someone to review it.
  • Integrate with other software. GanttPro integrates with a few major players, including Slack, OneDrive, Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, and Jira Cloud. But it’s not the long list of integrations offered by other tools. 
  • Help and support.  When you point at icons above the Gantt chart, a popup box describes the feature. Click Learn more to jump into a new browser tab with the GanttPro knowledge base. There are dozens of videos that show you how or you can search the knowledge base for articles.

To sum up, GanttPro could be a good fit for small businesses working on small to medium-sized projects without big demands for customization. It would also be a good Gantt chart add-on if you already have other PM software that doesn’t offer a Gantt chart feature.

If this sounds interesting, here’s info on pricing as of March 2025. The core plan doesn’t offer a lot, so the Advanced plan is a good place to start at $10 per user per month (paid annually). If you need resource management or portfolio management, you’ll want the Business plan ($17 per user per month paid annually). There’s also an Enterprise plan, which I didn’t look at. Their 14-day free trial gives you time to see which level works for you.

For more about other online project management tools, check out my Project Management: Choosing the Right Online Tool course.

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 88,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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