Project Management Essentials For Dummies, Australian and New Zealand Edition

Chapter 8

Managing the Risk

In This Chapter

Getting the hang of risk analysis and risk management

Deciding how to handle risks and taking action

Drafting a Risk Management Plan

Using some tools to help with a few risk management techniques

It’s sad to hear about good projects that fail — but it happens. Even sadder is when you find out a bit more and discover that a project was killed off by a problem that the Project Manager could easily have foreseen, controlled or even prevented.

Don’t let your project be unnecessarily damaged or even destroyed by something that, with a bit of effort, you can get a handle on. This is the realm of risk management. The good news is that the basics aren’t that difficult; in fact, you do risk management nearly all the time just to get through the day.

All projects need risk management, even the very small ones. However, some projects are clearly higher risk than others and justify more effort. Often the larger, more complex and longer your project is, the more risk management you need, but that doesn’t let small projects off the hook. The highest ...