Basic Risk Management

Risk Management is a critical part of the management of any project or in many cases an ongoing process. Defining the risk as early as possible in the life of the project is important, the ongoing process of Risk Management is equally critical to the success of the project.

Risk Management is important, so lets have a look at the basic process that are involved.

Initial Risk Capture

The initial process of risk capture should be started at the beginning of the project process, at this point the project is still being understood. Risk capture should be done quickly outlining all the potential problems without either evaluating or trying to solve the problem. After this process is finished the project team will have a list of risks by heading which we can then begin to group and evaluate the individual risks.

Initial Risk Evaluation

The initial evaluation phase will assess the risk based on relevant criteria, at this point many of the risks identified in the capture process are disregarded and others have been combined in to risk groups (risks that are related).

This is the first stage that I would normally use a risk log for documenting all the problems in more details, after evaluating the risk they should be categorised into the phase and the tasks that they affect in the project and the potential affect of the project becoming a issue.

Risk Contingency Planning (Corrective Planning)

After outlining and evaluating the tasks, the next stage is to focus on solutions to the problems either to offset the risk or to plan to cope with the risk if it happens. This stage may involve the outline creation of alternative plans that will be enacted if the risk becomes an issue.

Possibly the most important stage of all in this process is to identify an individual with responsibility for looking after each risk, in some cases this may be a specific risk manager and in others a member of the project team.

Ongoing Risk Management

After the project is underway any risk should be recorded evaluated in the Risk Contingency Planning process and an individual should be designated the responsibility to manage the risk.

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