5 Steps For Managing Project Risk

This simple 5 step process will help you manage project risk easily.

Step 1: Where are the risks?

The first step is to list everything that could have an impact on whether your project is a success. Think about all the potential problems that you could come across during the project and write them all down. It helps to do this with your team, as they will see things differently to you.

Step 2: What is the impact?

Now you have your list of risks it's time to see what impact they would have if they happened. You'll have the full spectrum: risks that won't cause big problems and risks that could potentially force your project to stop.

Prioritize the list of risks based on the impact: the ones with the largest impact are the highest priority. These are the areas you should focus on right now. Look at each individual risk, but also look at the risk profile overall—do all these risks add up to make your project really risky or is it going to be a low risk initiative? Use ProjectManager.com to present your project's risk profile as a report or dashboard, as that makes it easy for executive managers to see where potential problems lurk.

Step 3: What can you do?

Once you know the important, high priority risks, you can assign tasks to your team to deal with them. These actions are things that will stop the risk from happening or minimize the damage it will cause if it does happen. Add this work to your colleagues' task lists using the resource assignment functionality.

The actual work you do in this step depends on the risks you are facing. For example, if there is a risk that a supplier goes out of business, you might research other suppliers so you have that information just in case. If the risk is that the product won't be built in time for the launch day you could add more people to the team, revisit the plan or remove some items from scope to make it more achievable.

Step 4: Who is responsible?

With all your team's actions recorded and tasks assigned, it's an easy job to use your project management software to track who's responsible for what and whether they have done the work you asked them to. Make a note to monitor the work regularly and follow up with your team.

Step 5: What's next?

Schedule some formal review sessions to ensure that your existing risk work is on track overall. You can also use this time to check with your team about new risks: it's very likely that something new will have come to light since you started work. Finally, close any risks that are no longer relevant. There's no point reporting on things that won't happen so tidy up your risk register from time to time.

Risk management is an important part of managing a project. You are doing work to address something that might create a huge problem for your project. Good risk management is a sure-fire way to make your project more successful. Your processes and systems help you avoid problems by letting you deal with potential issues in advance!

In summary, keep on top of your project risks-it's easy to overlook risk management work in the busy times on projects but if a risk happens you'll wish you hadn't!

Use the risk management functionality built intoProjectManager.com for a smart way to manage risks and assign work to your team. Log and prioritize all your risks, track progress and create reports, all from one online system.