Issue Management Plan

Purpose

The issue management plan is a clear description of how the organization (or individuals) will contend with environmental, cultural, technical, and project-specific concerns that either exist or will inevitably come to pass. Because issues are conditions that must be dealt with (unlike risks, which may or may not occur), the issues management plan identifies concerns that must be either acknowledged or addressed.

Application

The issue management plan is primarily used in two environments: management reporting and problem tracking. For management reporting, the plan is used to raise management awareness of concerns (in many cases, concerns that they have authority to help reconcile). For problem tracking, the plan is shared with team members to ensure a consistent understanding of project issues and how they are being addressed.

Content

The issue management plan includes details on specific issues and their potential resolution. Dealing with specific issues allows managers to avoid those issues that are simply endemic cultural conditions (e.g., the team is spread all over the world), instead focusing on the project-oriented particulars (e.g., with one team in Kuala Lumpur and another in the United States, attendance at virtual meetings is consistently spotty). The difference allows the project manager, team, and management to understand the true nature of the problem and, ideally, to identify solutions. Once an issue is raised, its status is updated regularly either through the end of the project or until it is uniformly considered resolved.

Some issue management plans incorporate ownership designations for each issue to ensure that someone is tracking the issue and determining whether or not escalation to a higher level of management is appropriate.

Approaches

The key in issue management is to make it separate and distinct from risk management. Some organizations approach this by formatting risk management plans and issue management plans in similar tables, making the only distinction one of the nature of the two (risks may happen, while issues exist). Table 4.3 is an example of an issue management plan.

Considerations

Many organizations attempt to blur the line between issues and risks. Because risks are future phenomena, they require different types of assessment and management—and because issues are already in existence, they must be dealt with (or at least acknowledged) in real time. If team members, managers, and customers are not made aware of the distinction, there may be the expectation that all risks will be reassessed in real time, or that issues can be prioritized based on when or if they might occur. Those misconceptions can lead to mismanagement of the issues and/or risk events.