What Is & How To Create A Risk Management Plan - Emily Luijbregts, Digital Project Manager

This resource first appeared in issue #47 on 23 Oct 2020 and has tags Strategy: Risk Management, Strategy: Project Management

Most of us in research probably started off on fairly small and well-scoped projects where risk management wasn’t a significant factor; or the risks were well-understood enough that everyone knew how to deal with them so there wasn’t a need to separately track and manage the risks. If you get involved with larger and longer projects, though, especially ones that bring together a number of skills, it may be useful to explicitly keep track of risks - it might even be a funder mandate.

Luijbregts does a good job of demystifying terms like Risk Registers, RAID logs, and related concepts in this article, and provides templates as well. Like so much of management, dealing with risk is not rocket surgery; it’s just a matter of thinking things through systematically and applying some structure.

The first step is just to create a document where you’ll keep track of things that could risk your projects success - a risk registry. You can do this with your team; “pre-mortems” like we discussed in #43 are a great way to do that. Then prioritize them and come up with ways to mitigate the risk, or how to proceed if the risky event does happen.

For large enough projects there might be some pseudo-quantitative ways to prioritize the risks or different ways you might find helpful to categorize the risks, but the basics are there above. Think things through, write them down where people can see them, revisit periodically; that’s the heart of risk (or project, or people) management.