What is Project Risk Management?

Dear All,

Risk management is often given less than due importance, particularly by Indian project managers. This ignorance is one of the major contributor to project delay, cost overrun, and sometimes, failures.

Project risk management is all about identifying risks of the project, creating risk register, assigning risk realisation probability, calculating cost of risk, identifying stakeholders impacted by risks, identifying impact on project timeline, quality of deliverables, and cost of the project, creating plan B (and probably plan C also), explore the option of risk mitigation or risk transfer, transfer of risk to issue log after risk realisation probability is too high (may be beyond 80%) or when risk has occurred, submission of change request to invoke risk mitigation plan, and such related activities.

Project risk management is one of the key knowledge area (out of total 10 such areas) identified in PMBOK of project management Institute in USA. Entire concept is detailed in Simplified PMBOK, which may be your next venue to know more about it.

Coming back to weak link. Often project managers know the risks and keeps them in their brain with an approach to work on it when it comes. It is a loose-loose situation for you and project organisation. Let’s see how it affects. When risk is realised then you would highlight it to senior management, seek additional time and budget, and may be impact on quality of project deliverable. Obviously no one will like it and senior management will held project manager for the risks. On contrary, if you highlight risk from beginning, as soon as it was identified, then you would receive helping hand from senior management as project manager highlighted the risk and probably the budgeting was also done based on cost of risk.

Therefore, it becomes vital for any project managers to systematically work on project risk management to keep themselves in control of the project and get support from organisation to work on risk mitigation.

Happy learning!

Azuko Technical Institue