You have finished the risk management plan and are preparing to present it to your manager and the project sponsor. Once they review and approve it, you will then present it to the stakeholders and the team. Although the project has not officially started, some upfront design work is being done by the vendor and three of the engineers. In the course of this work, you sat in on a design meeting and discovered that the vendor does not follow the documentation processes you had clearly defined as critical, because of the regulated nature of the product. Your engineers, who are not comfortable with the formal process approach the new CEO is taking, have told the vendor not to worry about the documents because they will do them at the end after they get the real work done.

You spoke with the quality manager who was hired just a couple of weeks ago. He (understandably) feels that this is the occurrence of a major risk, with project-stopping ramifications. The quality manager agreed not to immediately go to the CEO, giving you the opportunity to present the risk event to the sponsor and implement your action plan.

During the course of the design meeting, you also determined that your risk of the key engineer not being available to the project is actually occurring. Some junior engineers are doing most of the design work and are clearly struggling. Your engineers left the meeting frustrated, grumbling, and nervous about the project.