Question

Discuss the ways that Issues Management can prepare an organization to handle Risk Management. What makes them different? Similar?

Answer 1

Answer:

Risk management is the identification, evaluation, and prioritization of risks followed by coordinated and economical application of resources to minimize, monitor, and control the probability or impact of unfortunate events or to maximize the realization of opportunities.

A risk is anything that could potentially impact your project’s timeline, performance or budget. Risks are potentialities, and in a project management context, if they become realities, they then become classified as “issues” that must be addressed. So risk management, then, is the process of identifying, categorizing, prioritizing and planning for risks before they become issues.

Manage Risk:

Building a risk management protocol into your organization’s culture by creating a consistent set of standard tools and templates, with training, can reduce overhead over time. That way, each time you start a new project, it won’t be like having to reinvent the wheel. You’ll have a head start and a path already in place to more efficiently and quickly address the specific risks of your individual project.

Things such as your organization’s records and history are an archive of knowledge that can help you learn from that experience when approaching risk in a new project. Also, by adopting the attitudes and values of your organization to become more aware of the risk, means your organization can develop a better sense of the nature of uncertainty as a core business issue. With improved governance comes better planning, strategy, policy and decisions.

All risk management processes follow the same basic steps, although sometimes different jargon is used to describe these steps. Together these 5 risk management process steps combine to deliver a simple and effective risk management process.

Step 1: Identify the Risk. You and your team uncover, recognize and describe risks that might affect your project or its outcomes. There are a number of techniques you can use to find project risks. During this step, you start to prepare your Project Risk Register.

Step 2: Analyze the risk. Once risks are identified you determine the likelihood and consequence of each risk. You develop an understanding of the nature of the risk and its potential to affect project goals and objectives. This information is also input to your Project Risk Register.

Step 3: Evaluate or Rank the Risk. You evaluate or rank the risk by determining the risk magnitude, which is the combination of likelihood and consequence. You make decisions about whether the risk is acceptable or whether it is serious enough to warrant treatment. These risk rankings are also added to your Project Risk Register.

Step 4: Treat the Risk. This is also referred to as Risk Response Planning. During this step, you assess your highest ranked risks and set out a plan to treat or modify these risks to achieve acceptable risk levels. How can you minimize the probability of the negative risks as well as enhancing the opportunities? You create risk mitigation strategies, preventive plans and contingency plans in this step. And you add the risk treatment measures for the highest ranking or most serious risks to your Project Risk Register.

Step 5: Monitor and Review the risk. This is the step where you take your Project Risk Register and use it to monitor, track and review risks.

The risk is about uncertainty. If you put a framework around that uncertainty, then you effectively de-risk your project. And that means you can move much more confidently to achieve your project goals. By identifying and managing a comprehensive list of project risks, unpleasant surprises and barriers can be reduced and golden opportunities discovered.

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