Risk Planning (Part 1)

Imagine yourself a Project Manager (Lead, Head of Department, etc.) starting a new project.

You begin collecting requirements, choosing the team members, determining the budget, and generally go through a standard list of project initiation. And the most insignificant point is erroneously neglected - risk planning.

Well, the results of project risk happening on a project usually come unexpectedly. Because how can we assume that a developer or even several team members may get sick or they may get into trouble (accident, family issues, or a global lockdown on quarantine), anything can happen.

Often ignoring the risks in the project result in an inability to fulfill the expected quality, deadlines, and bloated budget of the project. And the result will upset your client, and the client will turn to your boss with a complaint that he was promised completely different deadlines, budget, etc.

Your boss, while defending the interests of the client, of course, will accuse you of all the troubles of the project and will demand urgent resolving of the issues by all possible and impossible means, only to make the client happy!

And how to prevent such events on the project? What are the risk factors?

Let's review several general categories of risks:

* Force Majeure (earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, epidemics, other natural disasters)

* Regional (geopolitics, economic stability, political stability, military operations)

* Local (problematic infrastructure, power outages, unstable Internet connection)

* Internal company factors (staff turnover, employee demotivation, instability of payments).

Now, according to the list of the above risks, you can set the probability of risk happening based on statistics (official statistics or available from different verified sources) and the impact of a certain risk on your project/company.

It is essential to understand that risk planning may/will increase the budget by up to 15-20% and can change the timeline if the risk happens.

Small business risk management can become a crucial part of business continuity.

No one should underestimate the importance of risk management.

In the next article, we will talk about risk categories in detail.

#riskmanagement #riskassessment #indemnity #businesscontinuity