Free Project Risk Management Template

Risk Management is one of those project management areas that get more lip service than practice. There’s a perception that risk management is hard, complicated, takes a lot of time, and is boring.  While some risk management implementations can be all of these things, the risk management you choose to follow on your projects just needs to be “good enough”.

What is Good Enough Risk Management

Let’s invoke the 80/20 rule¹ in our definition. For small to medium IT projects, good enough risk management is simply this:

• Create a log of risks at the beginning of the project
• Rank each risk as follows:
  • Likelihood of it occurring (0 – 99%)
  • Impact on project scope, cost, time or quality if it occurs (0-99%)
• Prioritize the log by severity (likelihood X impact)
• Create mitigation strategies for risk items with greater than 50% severity
• Review the risks with the project team regularly throughout the project

Following this “good enough” risk management approach will put you in the driver’s seat of your project, and will reduce surprises for you on your project.

Note that the most important part of this risk management strategy is the thinking part.  If you rush through the creation of the risk items without really thinking about what you’re doing, you will likely miss some or all of the most important risks.  On the other hand, if you include too many risks, the ones that will “bite you” can hide in all the detail.  Finally, if you do this exercise in isolation from your project team, you will almost certainly miss important items.

Free Risk Management Log Template

Here is a basic risk management log template you can use freely.  If you have others that you would like to make available to other readers at no cost, please contact me.  I’ll add them here.

Originally posted 2010-03-30 06:00:07.

1. For most things, 20 percent of the effort will provide you with 80 percent of the positive results. [↩]

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