Fundamentals of Project Management, Third Edition

Assessing Project Risks

Once you have established your objectives, you can develop plans for how to achieve them. Unfortunately, the best plans sometimes don’t work. One safeguard in managing projects is to think about the risks ahead that could sink the job. This can be done for critical objectives and for other parts of the plan.

The simplest way to conduct a risk analysis is to ask, “What could go wrong?” or “What could keep us from achieving our objective?” It is usually best to list the risks first, then think about contingencies for dealing with them. One way to look at risk is to divide a flip chart page in half, have the group brainstorm the risks, which you write down on the left side of the page, and then go back and list the contingencies—things ...