Identifying risk

The process of identifying risk in project management can be summarized as both identifying individual risk for the project and sources of overall risk to the project. Thereafter documenting their characteristics. When the risk has been identified, this allows the project team to tackle the challenges arising with these risks. Identifying risks is a process that is performed throughout the project’s lifetime. When identifying risk, the step that you go through is create input, applying tools and techniques, and finally getting output. Creating input is essential for management to identifying the risk. Examples of what the input consist of: project management plan, project documents (Assumption log, cost estimates, issue log, etc), enterprise environmental factors, and much more. After creating input, certain tools can be used to identifying the risks. An in-depth look into them will come later, but some of them are: Expert judgement, data gathering, data analysis. The last part is the output. The output is 3 folded; 1. Risk register. 2. Risk report. 3. Project documents updates.

The 3 parts of identifying risks (input, tools & output) will be descried in greater details.

Big idea

Key references: • Project Management: A guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK guide), 6th Edition (2017)