Identify Risks

Identify Risks

• Identify Risks is the process of identifying individual project risks as well as

sources of overall project risk, and documenting their characteristics.
• The key benefit of this process is the documentation of existing individual project
risks and the sources of overall project risk.
• It also brings together information so the project team can respond appropriately
to identified risks.
• This process is performed throughout the project.
Cont…

• Participants in risk identification activities may include the following: project

manager, project team members, project risk specialist (if assigned), customers,
subject matter experts from outside the project team, end users, other project
managers, operations managers, stakeholders, and risk management experts
within the organization.
• While these personnel are often key participants for risk identification, all project
stakeholders should be encouraged to identify individual project risks.
• It is particularly important to involve the project team so they can develop and
maintain a sense of ownership and responsibility for identified individual project
risks, the level of overall project risk, and associated risk response actions.
• When describing and recording individual project risks, a consistent format
should be used for risk statements to ensure that each risk is understood clearly
and unambiguously in order to support effective analysis and risk response
development.
• Risk owners for individual project risks may be nominated as part of the Identify
Risks process, and will be confirmed during the Perform Qualitative Risk
Analysis process.
• Preliminary risk responses may also be identified and recorded and will be
reviewed and confirmed as part of the Plan Risk Responses process
Identify Risks - Input

• Project Management Plan

• Requirements Management Plan

• Schedule Management Plan
• Cost Management Plan
• Quality Management Plan
• Resource Management Plan
• Risk Management Plan
• Scope Baseline
• Schedule Baseline (Deliverables and Milestones)
• Cost Baseline (Cost and Funding requirements)
• Project Documents
• Assumption logs (Factor that is real or true without any empirical proof)
• e.g. You’ll have access to all the resources you need to complete the project, both
human and material.
• The scope of the project will not change throughout the life cycle. 
• Cost estimates
• Duration estimates
• Issue log
• Lessons learned register
• Requirements documentation
• Resource requirements
• Stakeholder register
• Agreements
• Procurement documentation
• Enterprise environmental factors
• Published material, including commercial risk databases or checklists
• Academic studies
• Benchmarking results
• Industry studies of similar projects
• Organizational Process Assets
• Project files, including actual data
• Organizational and project process controls
• Risk statement formats,
• Checklists from previous similar projects.
Identify Risks – Tools and Techniques

• Expert judgement
• Data Gathering
• Brainstorming
• Checklists
• Interviews
• Data Analysis
• Root cause analysis
• Assumption and constraint analysis
• Swot analysis
• Document analysis
• Interpersonal and team skills
• Prompt lists
• Meetings
Identify Risks - Outputs

• Risk Register
• List of identified risks
• Potential risk owners
• List of potential risk responses
• Risk Report
• Project Document Updates
• Assumption log
• Issue log
• Lessons learned register