by Craig Buck

Created on: February 24, 2011   Last Updated: December 15, 2011

Every project that is undertaken, whether large or small will always contain a certain element of risk. How this risk is managed will usually determine whether the project succeeds or fails. Inexperienced project managers may only concentrate on tasks that are high risk when performing a risk assessment but each task in a project needs to be evaluated in order to be completely in control of any project. While high risk tasks could threaten a project in isolation, a succession of failures in lower risk tasks could also cause major problems in a project.  In order to minimise risk in a project, a risk assessment plan needs to be created.

The risk assessment needs to be comprehensive no matter how large the project is.  Ambiguity should be avoided at all costs and concise actions should be documented. An example of risk could be a change in calculation, maybe as the result of a tax increase. The risk here would be that a change in calculation could result in the wrong value being returned. It is not uncommon for tasks in a project to have multiple risks and each of these risks needs to be evaluated in turn.

Once the risks have been identified, the impact of these needs to be documented. If there are a high percentage of high risk tasks, it may be worth looking at the project tasks and see if they can be broken down into smaller, lower risk tasks as a project with many high risk tasks would be quite likely to fail. Each task, regardless of the impact will then need a defence. The defence is the process that will happen should the identified risk become a reality. The defence should be a highly detailed narrative of what should happen to rectify the situation if the risk was to happen. Ideally the solution to the problem should not introduce another level of risk or jeopardise any subsequent task in the project although there could be some slippage in the project delivery schedule.

By clearly documenting potential risks at each stage of the project and the associated strategy to overcome problems, you should have a clear idea of where problems in a project are likely to occur. The risk assessment project management plan will serve as a vital document when allocating resources to stages of your project and is a great planning tool. It could be that by committing additional resources to a task could reduce the risk greatly. This information would only be available if a comprehensive risk assessment was carried out.

To summarise, the risk assessment project management plan should identify potential risk for each task in a project, analyse its impact on the project and come up with a viable strategy so that if the risk was to become a reality, the project would not be threatened in any way. With a highly detailed risk assessment plan, there should be no hidden surprises during the lifecycle of your project.

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