“What can go wrong?” This is probably the first thing that pops up in your mind when you start planning a project. This thought is not negative at all, but more preventative as it will keep you prepared for any issues that might inevitably arise. A strategy to prevent and manage any risk for your projects is just as important as the project itself. Therefore, risk management is an integral topic for your team to discuss.
Now to the main question, what is risk management and how does it work?
Risk management is the process of identifying, accessing, and taking appropriate steps to control the threats to the organisation’s business and earnings or mitigate the risks associated with different choices. Risk management is something that goes hand in hand with how successful your projects are going to be. There may be some events where risk management is unaccounted for, but in most projects, it holds an essential position.
The four essential steps to manage risks
To become an expert in risk management, you must know the process of how it is managed. For effective risk management, the project managers should know the exact understanding of their objectives so they may be able to identify, analyze, monitor, and respond to a risk that their project is facing.
- Identify
You can never resolve a risk when you do not even know what it is. The earlier you can identify the risk, the better you are in a position to determine how successful your project is going to be.
For identifying the risk, you must know your team, colleagues, and the stakeholders and look up similar kinds of projects from the past to identify the risks that are being faced.
- Analyze
The hardest part of risk management is risk analysis because when the data is overly complex and is at an exceptionally large scale, it is not easy to analyze it.
After identifying the risk, analyzing how big a risk can be to the project is authentic. There may be some risks that are highly likely to happen. Analyzing is to prioritise the risks and how they should be managed.
- Monitor
Monitoring is another important move that requires a lot of decision making and thinking about how a risk can impact your project objectives. If the risk is huge, it can deter your project from reaching its goal, delay your timeline, threaten your budget, or minimise the impact of your product and result.
- Response
Now that we know what the risk is and how it can impact on your business, it finally is the time to take necessary measures to tackle it, if at any point it becomes a reality. From all the above planning you now have the necessary knowledge of how to minimise the effect of risks on your project.
Remember the goal of risk management is not to prevent the risks but to lower the chances of that risk becoming a threat to your project. Risk management is complicated, but if you are transparent and everybody on the project knows what is going on, they might be able to help manage the entire process.
