Risk Management, 5th Edition

15

Risk Breakdown Structure

Some method of categorization or sorting is necessary and inevitable when identifying risk. Since risks naturally lend themselves to categorization and distillation, one tool—the RBS—has evolved in recent years to serve that end. Introduced (in its current form) by Dr. David Hillson in 2002 at the PMI^® Annual Seminars and Symposium (and adopted in the PMBOK^® Guide, third edition in 2004), the RBS is a hierarchical decomposition of the risks into logical, natural groupings associated with a project or an organization. (The Software Engineering Institute’s Taxonomy-Based Risk Identification actually developed the earliest RBSs in 1994.) The goal of the tool is to enhance understanding and recognition of risks in a project ...