Chapter 15
Managing Project Risk
In This Chapter
Defining risk
Deciding how to handle risk in the project
Identifying individual risks
Assessing the risks and thinking about how to handle them
Planning and implementing your risk actions
Using the Risk Register and Daily Log
Many projects neglect risk management, and that’s a common cause of project failure. This is a sad state of affairs, because risk management isn’t difficult to do, it’s often not that time-consuming, and it’s actually rather interesting.
At its very simplest, risk management is just asking ‘What can go wrong with this project?’ and then doing some simple management stuff to prevent that happening or at least to control it. Some argue that risk management is all negative and unnecessary. They say you’re just looking for trouble and wasting time looking at things that mostly never happen. In fact, as you’ll probably agree immediately as a wise user of PRINCE2, risk management is very positive. You do it to protect the project and to prevent or control things that otherwise may cause problems to the point of complete project failure. Actually PRINCE2 also covers ‘good’ risk and the work to try and increase the chances of something advantageous happening in the project.
In this chapter is good news and bad news. One bit of good news to mention at the outset is that overall PRINCE2 is quite good with its risk management. The method has limits in what it covers though, and you may well want to go further if you’re ...
