Risk Management, 5th Edition

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Urgency Assessment

In a variety of situations, the question is not whether a particular risk must be addressed but rather whether it must be addressed now. Although a critical criterion for assessing risks, urgency normally falls into an analysis process after the assessment of probability and impact. However, because urgent, low-threat risks generally do not receive a great deal of attention in a high-pressure environment, they are not typically the subject of an urgency assessment. By contrast, high-probability, high-impact threats may need to be assessed for urgency to determine which threat events should be dealt with first. As a consequence, an urgency assessment is customarily based on the immediacy of the threat plus the effect that ...