What is a Red Team Review, and why do top organizations use Red Teaming to challenge plans and expose hidden weaknesses? In this video, you’ll learn the origins of red teaming, how Red Team Reviews work in project environments, and practical ways to use them to improve decision-making and reduce risk. Perfect for project managers, leaders, and anyone responsible for delivering successful outcomes.
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Red Team Review
A Red Team Review is a proactive, adversarial testing exercise where a dedicated team or individual (the ‘Red Team’) attempts to deliberately break, exploit, or find flaws in the Project’s defenses against failure, misunderstanding, or external roadblocks.
The goal of red teaming is to bring a critical, skeptical, and adversarial viewpoint to your project before you commit significant resources based on a fragile plan. You are trying to defend the Project Delivery Plan against the harshest possible scrutiny. Success will give you increased confidence that your plan is robust enough to survive the journey from inception to completion.
The Origin of Red Team Reviews
The idea comes from the world of cybersecurity, where a Red Team attacks a system with a goal to breach security, exploit vulnerabilities, cause failure, or prove a business logic flaw exists.
A competing Blue Team tries to defend against the attacks, detect the breach in real-time, and mitigate the exploit.
A White Team oversees the exercise, ensures it remains within agreed-upon bounds (scope, time, legality), and manages the communication between the Red and Blue Teams.
Translation to the Project Context
In our context, the red team is a smart and highly skeptical group of experts whose goal is to find flaws in the plan, assumptions, and estimates that the original team missed. None of the red team members will have been involved in the work they are reviewing.
The project team that developed the baseline plan is the equivalent of the blue team, and the white team role can be played by the Project Manager, Project Sponsor, Project Board, or PMO.
Why do we do Red Team Reviews?
A Red Team Review in project management is vital because it trades upfront time for massive downstream savings.
If you launch into execution without one, you risk working to a flawed plan that misses something vital. When the first problem emerges, the entire project schedule and budget can suffer slips.
With a Red Team Review, you spend a fraction of the time upfront subjecting your plan to harsh criticism. When an issue arises during delivery, there is a better chance that it is in the revised plan, and your red team already stress-tested it and factored it in as contingency.
How to Carry Out a Red Team Review
The Red Team will attack the plan on multiple fronts:
- Attacking Assumptions
The Red Team challenges the fundamental truths the project is based on. - Attacking Dependencies and Constraints
The Red Team looks for un-noticed external dependencies and constraints. It then reviews the impacts of the original and new dependencies and constraints critically. - Attacking Estimates/Sizing
The Red Team challenges the effort and budget estimates. - Attacking Internal Plan Dependencies
The Red Team evaluates the logic of the internal dependencies in your plan, and the arithmetic in budget calculations. - Attacking Risk Responses
The Red Team looks for unidentified risks and re-evaluates the assumptions about impact, likelihood, and proximity of all risks. It reviews mitigations, contingencies, and recovery plans.
Summing up Red Team Reviews
In essence, a Project Management Red Team Review is a high-fidelity simulation designed to test the plan’s resilience against its own weaknesses.
Recommended Videos to Help with Avoiding Project Failure
Carefully curated video recommendations for you:
- Before You Start: How to Carry out a Risk Potential Review
- What is a Pre-mortem? …and how do you run one?
- Learning from Your Mistakes | Video
- Project Planning Mistakes and How to Avoid the 12 Most Scary Ones
- Failure and Blame: Learn to Avoid Project Failure | Video
- Project Turnaround: How to Rescue a Failing Project
- Three Kinds of Stupid: Avoid Project Failure | Video
- Avoid Project Failure: 5 Top Tips | Video
- Why do Projects Fail? 10 Points of Project Failure
- Failing Project: Do You Know When it’s Time to Pause Your Project?
What Kit does a Project Manager Need?
I asked Project Managers in a couple of forums what material things you need to have, to do your job as a Project Manager. They responded magnificently. I compiled their answers into a Kit list. I added my own.
Check out the Kit a Project Manager needs
Note that the links are affiliated.
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