Every multi-team program comes pre-loaded with the same five risks. They differ in flavor — different teams, different vendors, different domains — but the shape repeats. The good delivery managers find them in week one. The poor ones find them in week thirteen, when one of them has already cost a milestone.
Here's the list, and how to surface each one early.
1. Inter-team dependencies that don't have an owner
Teams A and B both assume the other is shipping the integration between their systems. Each team has it in their backlog, prioritized just low enough that it never quite happens. Both leads have a rough plan that hasn't been compared with the other's rough plan.
Find it in week one: run a dependency mapping session with leads from every team. Write each cross-team deliverable on a card with three fields: producer, consumer, deadline. If a card has either field missing, you've found a risk. Most projects have two or three of these in the first hour.
2. Vendor coordination drift
Agency X and platform Y are both shipping pieces of the program, and they haven't actually talked. The kickoff was with you, separately. They've each made assumptions about the other's deliverable that they would not make if they were on a call together.
Find it in week one: schedule a one-hour kickoff with all vendors in the same room. Ask each one to spend five minutes describing what the other vendor is delivering. The silences are the risk.
3. Hidden tech debt the team routes around
The existing codebase has a module that everyone knows is broken. There's an internal workaround. The new program touches that module. Nobody mentioned this in the scoping call because everyone assumed everyone else knew.
Find it in week one: 1-on-1s with the two or three senior engineers who've been on the codebase longest. One question, asked early: "If you had a free week to fix any one thing in this codebase, what would you fix?" The first three answers are the hidden debt. The fourth is usually something you didn't know existed.
4. Stakeholder misalignment
Two executives have different success criteria for the program. Neither has said so out loud — possibly neither has fully articulated it. The team is being pulled toward each by different intermediaries. The first scope review will surface the conflict, but by then the team has burned three sprints building toward both targets.
Find it in week one: write a one-paragraph outcome statement before any work starts. Circulate it to every stakeholder. Watch where the wording gets edited. Disagreement on a single adjective ("scalable", "compliant", "automated") is usually a four-week scope dispute waiting to happen.
5. Velocity assumptions that don't survive contact
The plan assumes the team will hit its historic velocity on this new work. But the work is novel — new domain, new tech, new dependencies — and historic velocity was on familiar work. The plan books capacity that doesn't exist.
Find it in week one: ask the team two questions during the first sprint planning. What is your confidence in this estimate? and What would change it? The answers are usually direct. A team that says "low — we haven't built anything like this before" is giving you a gift. A team that says "high" without specifics is the risk.
What to do with the list
Week one is the easy part. The harder part is not deciding to deal with them later.
The temptation, especially in a program with momentum, is to log each of these in a risk register and check it weekly. That works for tracking. It doesn't work for resolution. By the time a "monitored" risk becomes urgent, you've lost the cheap window where it could have been resolved with a conversation.
For each of the five, decide in the first two weeks: who owns the resolution, by when, and what the cost is of slipping. The risks that don't have a named owner in week three are the ones that take down the milestone in week thirteen.
A delivery manager who surfaces these in week one isn't pessimistic. They're doing the job. The program manager who waits to find them in week three thinks they're being diplomatic. They're being expensive.