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Why do this at all, you may ask? Well consider that the next step after finding your million dollar blind spots is to move to increase opportunities, and revenues, and decrease risks, or costs.  When you accomplish those results, life becomes a lot more fun and less stressful.

Your next thought may be how to get started doing this on a very limited budget. After all, the lower the budget, the more likely your organization will approve it.

Consider 3 tests others will apply afterwards on how well you found those blind spots.

1. Major blind spots can both have good upsides and bad downsides.
2. Some major blind spots are clearly unexpected and defensible.
3. Some are easy to see using hindsight, as the world is now prone to do.

Now that practice applying that test.

A colleague sent met an article Black swans busting IT budgets describing one out of 6 big Information Technology projects running 200% over budget, which were blamed upon unforeseeable black swan events.

Most of you would classify that article as meeting two of the prior points. That seems to be a bad downside and they seem easy to see using hindsight. Few of you would accept the second comment being met with the survey statements that the overruns are either unexpected or defensible. Most would tend to do a post project review and focus on leadership, project management and communication aspects where the project did well and where lessons could be learned from shortfalls. Accepting a black swan statement sweeps such a review process under the table.

Remember the earlier statement about the goal of this article is to get you started finding those major blind spots on a limited budget. The budget for this starter level process will primarily be leadership time, strategically invested, using the process in the next paragraph.

Before you decide how to classify efforts to evaluate your organizations abilities on this point, apply the following 3 questions to your ERM, contingency planning or strategic update processes:

1. When does the claim about blind spots become more of an excuse than a defensible statement?
2. What are the impacts and costs from failing to address such puffery?
3. What is the monetary risk threshold that must be crossed before anyone should care?

This inexpensive process starts decisions on several key elements of enterprise risk management for your organizational risk management assessment. You got started, created numbers to apply to risk elements, and created a monetary risk threshold.

Shared courtesy of ezine articles

As part of a discussion on Million Dollar Blind Spots in difference functional areas, DIRK BAXTER, PhD, SPHR Senior Talent Strategist of www.leadershipfutures.com was gracious enough to provide this link to share ‘Black swans’ busting IT budgets . http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14677143

Some of you may be amazed to learn “One in six big IT projects go over-budget by an average of 200%, according to new research. Researchers said that rare but high-impact problems, dubbed “black swans”, were often to blame.”

Personally this supposed black swan Million Dollar Blind Spot seems to scream out for the need for independent outside experts to shine lights that internal resources seem hesitant to express.

Sometimes that overrun can be hidden.  Think about Knight Capital and the loss encountered from their trading snafu.

The last major IT project I led had to choice except to come in on budget. If we could not show saving enough money by the end of the year to pay for the next year, the conversion shut down and we went hungry. Therefore, that IT project which I led for a Fortune 500 pilot came in on budget.

Please tell us your IT project success or horror story.