
Some risks are very likely others aren’t. Your risk management plan should give you a scale to help figure out the probability of the risk. Many projects classify impact on a scale from minimal to severe, or from very low to very high. The impact tells you how much damage the risk would cause to your project. It’s important to come up with guidelines to help you figure out how big a risk’s potential impact could be. Others are external, like changes in the market or even problems with the weather. Some risks are technical, like a component that might turn out to be difficult to use. It documents how you’ll assess risk, who is responsible for doing it, and how often you’ll do risk planning (since you’ll have to meet about risk planning with your team throughout the project). The risk management plan tells you how you’re going to handle risk in your project. That’s why you need to plan for risks from the beginning and keep coming back to do more planning throughout the project. If you can’t avoid the risk, and there’s nothing you can do to reduce its impact, then accepting it is your only choice.īy the time a risk actually occurs on your project, it’s too late to do anything about it.

But even when you accept a risk, at least you’ve looked at the alternatives and you know what will happen if it occurs.


Some events (like finding an easier way to do an activity) or conditions (like lower prices for certain materials) can help your project. So does that mean that you’re helpless against unknown problems? No! You can use risk planning to identify potential problems that could cause trouble for your project, analyze how likely they are to occur, take action to prevent the risks you can avoid, and minimize the ones that you can’t.Ī risk is any uncertain event or condition that might affect your project. Team members get sick or quit, resources that you were depending on turn out to be unavailable, even the weather can throw you for a loop (e.g., a snowstorm).

No matter how well you plan, your project can always encounter unexpected problems. Even the most carefully planned project can run into trouble.
