A06 – Identify risks and plan responses
This management activity belongs to the Project Initiation group. This group of activities are run at the beginning to prepare us for the project.
Conduct workshops with key team members to first identify risks, and then to plan responses to them. Store the information in the Follow‑Up Register.
Based on the identified risks and planned responses, you may need to adjust the Project Description and the Deliverables Map as well.
If a similar project has been done before, check its archive to learn more about the risks related to your project.
Purpose
The main reason for identifying risks is to plan responses to them proactively, because it’s much easier and cheaper to control risks before they materialize rather than after.
Common pitfalls
The following helps you avoid some of the commonest pitfalls in risk management:
- Don’t record general, unclear items as risks.
- Don’t record general, unclear items as risk responses – only design actionable responses that can be implemented and evaluated.
- Don’t record the potential impacts of uncertain events as risks – it’s the uncertain events themselves that we need to evaluate, and those are what we call risks.
- Assign a custodian to be responsible for the follow-up actions of each risk. It’s best to spread this responsibility among many team members rather than just a few of them.
Principles
The following principles play a significant role in this management activity: