Hybrid Project Management

15Identifying and Prioritizing Risk

Identifying risks is everyone's job. Even though the risk management plan defines roles and responsibilities for risk management, everyone should be on the lookout for events that could negatively affect the project as well as opportunities to improve project performance. Once risks are identified, they need to be analyzed and prioritized.

In this chapter you will learn several methods for identifying risks. In addition to the standard practice of analyzing risk by evaluating probability and impact, we will look at several additional variables you can use to analyze risk. You can use these variables to calculate a risk score. Then you will be able to prioritize risk based on the risk score.

Some risks may require additional analysis, so we will go over two ways to quantify risks.

IDENTIFYING RISKS

Risk identification and the subsequent analysis and response take place throughout the project. The project charter usually identifies high‐level risks. These are just broad topics, not risk events. For example, the Dionysus Winery project identified these four areas as having a lot of uncertainty:

• Availability of staff with needed skills;
• Timeliness of permits and certificates of occupancy;
• Availability of materials;
• Cost of materials.

As you can see, these topics are too broad to develop responses; however, they do provide some initial areas you can focus on when starting to identify risk events.

Identification Methods

It's challenging to ...