Since you’ve already learned about Focus HQ’s Risk Management framework, let's talk about a closely related concept, Issues.
Unlike a risk, which is an uncertain event, an issue is a problem that is already being encountered and is currently negatively impacting the project. Each issue has a rating to help identify the relevant priority when compared to other issues. Typically, issues will relate to a negative impact to the budget, schedule, benefit, etc.
Managing issues follows a similar process to risks, where you identify, analyze, respond and resolve each issue as they arise only if reward-vs-effort outweighs accepting the issue. Issue management is part of every project and the delivery team should always expect them to occur and be ready to resolve them as they arise.
When dealing with issues, it is ideal to understand the organizations issue management strategy prior to the project being executed as they will occur at every stage. Your stakeholders, program managers and PMO’s expect to have visibility of issues, how you are managing them and correspondence as to their resolution – so be sure to include them in your regular reporting.
Tip: Identifying and mitigating risks early on through your project will help reduce the amount of issues that occur later. A great way to gain early visibility is to learn from previous projects, and benefit from the team's past experiences. This way, you'll have fewer issues to manage as you move forward.
Actively tracking an issues log empowers you and the project to:
Set key priorities to actively resolve any blockers occurring within the project
Empower your team to raise all issues, instead of hiding them
Provide a reliable and consistent method for the team to raise issues.
Track and assign responsibility to specific people for each issue.
Assign multiple actions against each issue for specific team members to help you solve them.
Analyze and prioritize issues more easily.
Record issue resolution for future reference and project learning.
Monitor overall project health and status.
Focus HQ is a great tool to record project issues (Issues Log) as they happen. When you create issues, the application will automatically highlight the important ones to resolve, automated reporting on escalated items and provide visibility into your project. This makes sure that issues are indeed raised, and then investigated and resolved quickly and effectively. Without a defined process, you risk ignoring issues, or not taking them seriously enough – until it's too late to deal with them successfully.
In Focus HQ, you can create an issue manually, upload in bulk via CSV or alternatively, create an Issue from an existing Risk.
However, do bear in mind that the success of your issue management process doesn't necessarily depend on which tracking mechanism you use, but rather on the type of information you track. So, make sure your team captures the detailed description of the issue, timing, owner, resolution plan, target resolution date and its priority (such as ‘high’, ‘medium’ and ‘low’).
Be sure to also maximize Focus HQ by creating Actions for specific issues. The helps identify what needs to be done in more detail, assign who will do the action and when they will complete it by.
You can check the video below on how to create an Issue and an action for an issue:
To import Issue items in a CSV file, you can check this video below:
Please also visit the Focus HQ Support Portal for more details:
Feel free to explore a lot more of Focus HQ’s Issue management capabilities by navigating through the Issues module.
If you have any other questions, you can reach out to us via the Focus HQ Help or send us an email to support@focushq.com. We’ll be happy to guide you in navigating through these and provide other valuable support links when needed.