Register now or log in to join your professional community.
Having a brainstorming session with team member to list out several potential risk items is a good beginning. Include all potential risks, including the risks that are already known and assumed, such as scope creep. Include threats that may stem from human threats, operational issues, procedural impacts, financial threats and natural events. Talk to the industry experts who may have experience in your project type to get a different perspective.
Identify not only the threats, but also any opportunities that may impact your project. Opportunities may assist you in bringing the project in on schedule, perhaps with better deliverables or make it more profitable.
Communication at this stage is crucial. Including communication of risk as part of all meetings is effective to illustrate the importance of risk management, share the risk potentials and provide a platform for discussion.
Risk avoidance or reduction can start with risk assignments, then calculating the level of risks found through probabilities of occurrence and the impact of the risk o the business or the service. Ignorance of low risks/low impact as they won't apply a significant damage to business values or service continuity. Apply suitable risk management technique to avoid medium to high risks such as risk mitigation or transfer. Mission critical processes or processes should be assented by redundancy and/7 support contracts and a adequate disaster recovery/ business continuity plans. continues evaluation of emerging risks and risk awareness programs is highly recommended.
The most important thing is the identification of risks and dependencies that might impact the project.
SWOT analysis is one technique and then CPM to identify the critical path and various dependencies. As mentioned in the answer by Piotr Teteruk, brainstorming with the team members also helps identify potential risks.
Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is an effective tool. Once the risks are identified, we list them and assign risk priority number (RPN) for each of the identified risks. RPN is arrived at by scoring each risk based on the frequency of occurrence, detectability of the risk and the severity of risk. Risk with the highest RPN should be on the radar and steps taken to mitigate them at the earliest.
