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The Importance of the Risk Log

March 13, 2010 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Musings, Risk Management

The Importance of the Risk Log
By Kerry Wills

Every project that I have ever worked on treats risk management in the following way:

  1. Create a list of possible risks early on in the project and document their impact
  2. Never look at that list again

I am guilty of this as well but wanted to ponder why that is the case. I always find a disproportional amount of speakers, articles and books of risk management as compared to other PM topics and found this fascinating in comparison to the number of professionals who actually do deliberate risk management.

It makes sense when planning to document the risks as a way of saying “I told you so” for anything that might come up later on in the project. I always enjoy the following risks that I see on logs related to estimates:

  • Risk we might not finish the work
  • Risk that we didn’t estimate everything
  • Risk that people will leave the project
  • Risk that the solution won’t work
  • Risk the business will change their mind

These aren’t exactly what they say but it is the same essence. We use risks as a way of documenting that we actually don’t have confidence in the plans or estimates and things will come up (which they always do). This seems almost silly and could be covered by saying “there is a risk that what we put for initial plans will change.”

However, once we start running the project risks usually get pushed to the wayside because we spend so much time with managing the plan, managing the people, communicating, documenting status reports and other day-today activities. It is very difficult to step back and think of all of the possible risks that could impact the project.

I admit that I am not very diligent with a separate risk log. Rather, I spend time looking forward in the plan and making sure that upcoming tasks will start on time, resources are ready when needed and in-flight work is proceeding according to plan. I suppose in a way this is risk management.

I am curious as to what other people do for risk management and think about spending the time on it.

Kerry Wills is a proven Program Manager/Portfolio Manager with an extensive background in Project Management, consulting, and application development. Kerry has consistently demonstrated the ability to plan and implement large and complex projects on time and on/under budget. Kerry runs a blog, Adventures in Project Management.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 13th, 2010 and is filed under Project Management Musings, Risk Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 people have left comments

Thank you Kerry for bringing up this subject! I am myself trying to work out the ideal framework when it comes to risk management. I have also discussed this topic with my mentor and he shared with me the process that is in place at his company, which is a risk-averse.

The risk management there starts with the brainstorming from the whole team; everyone is invited to contribute to the list of possible risks. The risks are put on sticky notes and also assigned the probability and impact. For those risks with high impact and high probability, the team tries to come up with a solution to move it down on the impact/probability graph. That’s all just prep work, however, but the biggest challenge is to actually keep these risks in mind.

I found that both PMI and my mentor suggest to actually put the mitigating strategy into the project plan. That helps to keep risks visible as you mentioned yourself that you always keep an eye on the plan and upcoming tasks. Ideally the rest of the risk log should also be reviewed periodically and included in the status updates. Of course sometimes there are risks that we did not foresee; those become lessons learned.

In an ideal feedback loop, lessons learned also serve as a base for the risk brainstorming session of future projects.

I would be interested to hear how others deal with risk management on their projects.

Olga Sa wrote on March 13, 2010 - 10:55 pm | Visit Link

Olga is dead-on. It’s great that a PM spends the time to come up w/ the risks - but that’s a waste of time if you don’t actually deal w/ them! Put them in your plan. Schedule them!

Laura Bamberg wrote on March 15, 2010 - 9:28 am | Visit Link

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