Development Cooperation Handbook/Designing and Executing Projects/Project Risk/Project risk management planning

Programme/Project Risk Management is the process of evaluating alternative responses to project risks and selecting among them. It is the process of evaluating alternative responses to project risk and selecting among them.

A Risk management plan is a document prepared by a project manager to foresee risks, to estimate the effectiveness, and to create response plans to mitigate them. It also consists of the risk assessment matrix.

Project Risk Management

A risk is defined as "an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on a project's objectives. "Risk is inherent with any project, and project managers should assess risks continually and develop plans to address them. The risk management plan contains an analysis of likely risks with both high and low impact, as well as mitigation strategies to help the project avoid being derailed should common problems arise. Risk management plans should be periodically reviewed by the project team in order to avoid having the analysis become stale and not reflective of actual potential project risks.

Risk management planning in projects/programmes include at least the following processes:

Risk Analysis A systematic use of available information to determine how often specified events may occur and the magnitude of their consequences. it involves listing expected risk areas; compare project objectives to risk items and identify manageable risks.

Risk Avoidance and Mitigation plan Designing activities in such a way as to minimize risk exposure.

Risk Management Plan Identify  specific work processes to respond to the eventuality that risk occur.

Most critically, risk management plans include a risk strategy. Broadly, there are four potential strategies, with numerous variations. Projects may choose to:

Accept risk; simply take the chance that th e negative impact will be incurred Avoid risk; changing plans in order to prevent the problem from arising Mitigate risk; lessening its impact through intermediate steps Transfer risk; outsource risk to a capable third party that can manage the outcome

During Project Execution and Control risk management takes the form of monitoring and controlling risks.

see ⇒ Template: Quality Plan