PLANNING STAGE (RISKS) : IDENTIFY RISKS

This is a second process of planning risks whereby the risks that may affect the project are determined and documented. The risks can be identified by project manager, project team members, customers, previous project managers, stakeholders, end users, risk management experts etc. This process is ongoing activity because new risk may arise as the project progresses. The risks should be stated clearly to be well understood in order to avoid ambiguous and help to determine effective responses to the particular risks.

The inputs to use for this particular process as our references are:

• Risk Management Plan whereby the components like categories of risks, assigned roles and responsibilities, Risk Breakdown Structure that was formulated from Work Breakdown Structure to mention as few are stated.
• Cost Management Plan whereby the risks related to the project costs are determined such as unit of measures like currency fluctuation etc
• Schedule Management Plan whereby the risks that may affect activities durations, working time for staff and other equipment etc are identified.
• Quality Management Plan whereby the risks that may affect the quality requirements for the product or project are determined including quality metrics and measures.
• Human Resource Management Plan whereby the risks that may happen when dealing with human resources from defining, staffing, managing and releasing them in the project, are identified.
• Scope Baseline whereby the risks can be determined from the scope statement and even from Work Breakdown Structure.
• Activity cost estimates whereby the risks can be determined from the proposals and bids submitted by the sellers and most especially if there is wrong or poor cost estimation.
• Activity duration estimates whereby the risks can be determined if there is wrong or poor possible range of duration for the activity
• Stakeholder register whereby the risks can be determined from poor analysis of the stakeholders basing on their interests, power and influences towards the project.
• Project and Procurement documents whereby the risks can be determined from the documents created in the planning process from the knowledge areas. Sometimes they may miss some important information or component that needs to be documented. Issue log is one of the important documents to use.
• Enterprise Environmental Factors whereby the risks can be determined from both internal and external environment such as change of management, change of staff, poor infrastructure, poor policy, risk altitudes etc
• Organizational Process Assets whereby the risks can be determined from the previous similar projects such as lessons learnt, risk statement formats and templates to mention as few as references for this process.

Identify risks process can be done by:

• Reviewing Documentations such as agreements, plans, project files etc to determining the risks indicators of the project
• Gathering information through
• Interviewing experienced project participants, stakeholders and experts on the subject
• Brainstorming together with project team 
• Delphi technique whereby the experts are questioned through questionnaires and their responses are circulated in order to reach consensus
• Analyzing root cause of a problem and develop a preventive action
• Analyzing risks identification checklists from previous similar projects though they need to be updated from time to time and project team should explore more which are not included on the checklists.
• Analyzing assumptions applied to the project
• Using causes and effect diagram for the risks, refer Ishikawa or fishbone diagram
• Analyzing SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threats) whereby positive and negative risks can be identified and see if strength can reduce threats and opportunity can overcome weaknesses.
• Using judgement from experienced experts on the similar projects.

The output of this process is called Risk register, a document that contains the list of identified risks and their potential responses.

References:

PMI (2013). A Guide to the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide 5^th Ed.) USA, Project Management Institute

https://projectmanagementinsight.com/identify-risks/