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Getting the most out of risk assessment


This presentation covered 3 topics; recent developments in approaches to risk management, the benefits a risk assessment can bring to a project team outside of the core risk management activity, and what we can learn from the relationships between risks.

  • Insights flowing from the new international standard IEC 62198:2013, Managing risk in projects, based on ISO 31000:2009, provide guidance not just on how to identify the most severe risks but also how to set priorities for treatment and for control assurance.

  • The so called 'side effects' of a risk assessment may be as much a motivation to carry one out as the need to manage risks and, if these are taken in to account when preparing a risk assessment, the exercise can deliver value on many fronts.

  • Risk statements often embody important cause-effect relationships and cause-effect relationships also exist between separate risk statements. Using techniques that help to expose clusters within sets of related items, it is possible to identify strategic priorities for risk treatment that span an entire project and lift our sights from dealing with individual risks to managing risk in a project as a whole.