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Best of PMTimes: Top Project Risk Management Strategies And Practices

Published on September 24, 2019

 

Every project is attached with a risk of failure.

Hence, it should be your top responsibility to identify and plan ahead in order to avoid these points of failure. A risk can be a threat with a negative impact on the project principles or it can either be an opportunity which leads to a positive effect. But, there are various strategies to deal with both the positive and negative risks when we talk about project management. Project Management includes new IT systems, new products, and new markets or changes in the business environment to take regulatory or competitive actions.

Project risk management is revolving around identifying the threat level of existing business processes. The ultimate challenge for the project manages is to get the expert teams in functional areas who consist of proper knowledge of business processes and systems aligned for achieving new goals. Along with this, it is mandatory to get the required transparency into the activities which are agreed upon for project execution and how to prioritize the issues that surface every phase of the project.

In this article, we will be looking at some key strategies and practices that can be incorporated to reduce the risks and achieve the desired project goal.

 

Differentiate Between Risk Events And Project Risk

It is essential for every project manager to differentiate between both these terms as it helps to analyze the project risk before planning out strategies. A risk event is defined as a set of circumstances that has a negative impact on the project meeting or one of the project goals whereas Project risk is the exposure of the stakeholders towards the consequences of alterations in the output.

Risk Events are a sort of singular incident that can wreck the whole project. You can think about a secret weapon that is dropping out or a mistake in a 3D printer which can postpone making a model. In opposition to this, project risk is progressively formless and considered as an aggregate of all the individual risk events and vulnerabilities. It might be possible that risk event does not result in project failure but the project risk can certainly end up creating disaster. It is difficult to manage the project risk as there are circumstances that happen outside your control which you have not planned for.

 

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Develop Separate Plans For Explicit And Implicit Risk Management

When you deal with the risk events and the entire project risks, it requires the project managers to develop different plans at various levels. One is an Explicit risk management plan which deals with an individual risk event and revolves around identifying, analyzing and responding or controlling the individual risks. Another one is Implicit risk management risk that deals with overall project risk and revolves around analyzing the project structure, content, context, and scope.

Explicit risk management plans by enabling you to make a rundown of the considerable number of segments in the undertaking and the odds of bombing them. This needs to get a more profound knowledge into the past records, industry benchmarks and standard practices of distinguishing an inappropriate thing. On the other hand, the implicit risk management plans are created in the pre-project phase itself where you have to analyze everything besides the individual risks that can lead to the project failure.

 

Different Ways To Identify Risks

As the agency grows so does its experience of risks. After a specific number of tasks, you don’t find that the dangers rehash themselves. It can spare you a huge amount of time on the off chance that you build up a procedure to inventory these dangers when you run comparable undertakings later on. Here, are some variant ways to figure out the risks. It is not mandatory to use all the given tactics but you can use it according to your needs.

Checklist analysis: This approach involves creating a checklist of your present processes and resources. By doing so, you can ensure whether the targets are getting hit or require any further push for the same.

Expert Analysis: In this approach, you need to ask an experienced project member, stakeholders and domain experts regarding the potential risks. Also, you can interview them about the risks which they have encountered in the past projects and get an idea based on their opinions.

Risk Repository: The risk repository ought to turn into the main stop for the risk distinguishing proof procedure. It is a list of all the essential risks that are encountered in finished projects along with their solutions. The ultimate idea is that there can be an overlap in the objectives of the project and also in the risks.

Status report extrapolation: Here, you need to consider all the available reports be its status report, progress report or quality report to determine the extrapolate risk from them.

Wrap Up

Despite the fact that risk management has developed into a perceived control, it has still not arrived at its pinnacle and can get additionally created. We have tried to mention the main areas where you can focus more to ensure control over the project failures and risks. Till then – keep learning!