Risk Register Activity

We don’t want to see our project fail. Especially when we know we could have easily avoided it in the beginning. It is very useful to identify possible pitfalls at the start and come up with appropriate actions. It is likely that mitigation strategies will be much cheaper than accepting those risks.

This exercise activates team’s resilience to possible pitfalls and improves the likelihood of success.

Steps to take:

1. Prepare a template. It could be your favourite dashboard, or even a digital spreadsheet.
2. Make sure to invite the right participants. Don’t forget to ensure a diversity — you will need various perspectives.
3. Collect inputs: ask people to come up with risks that may impact the project in a bad way (let’s not go too classic to collect positive risks). Use your team’s favourite method. It can be a fishbowl discussion, a brain-writing, or simply a moderated discussion if the group is not large.
4. Energise the team if it gets too boring.
5. Group the responses if needed and pick up them up one by one asking the likelihood and impact (low-moderate-high).
6. After you finish with ranking, sort them and start discussing your strategies. What should you do with each risk? Risks can be avoided, mitigated, transferred, shared, exploited, enhanced, accepted.
7. Once you have a strategy for every risk you wanted to address, decide who will take care of that and plan a follow-up.
8. Make it look good and publish the document available for the team and its stakeholders.

The risks usually change as you make progress with your project. If you see there are new risks, don’t hesitate to call people again to update the register.

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