Don’t believe anyone who would say risk management is no place for creative minds! The risk identification process is a flux of wild ideas, which can carry you away if you are not careful. This is why today we are going to talk about tools that will help you manage that creative energy and not let you get carried away. These tools are a Risk Map and a Risk and Issues log. They serve the purpose of providing a framework and a structure for your ingenious ideas. The risk map, the ultimate outcome of the first step, provides an overview for all jeopardies a project is or might be facing. Leveraging this map to navigate through your project journey means introducing a Risk and Issues log that will help you focus and channel your attention. Having its periodic revision as one of the key routines will ensure you arrive at a safe harbor.

Let us have a look at the steps you need to go through when creating the log. As you can see, our vortex is moving through a kind of funnel becoming narrower at each step:

1. Conduct a risk-storming session
2. Group the Risks and construct a Risk Map
3. Create the first Risks and Issues Log
4. Formulate a generic Action & Communication Plan
5. Establish a Revision & Actualization Routine

At the planning stage of a project, when the mind is still fresh and not confined by tunnel vision, a deliberate “Risk Storming” session is exactly what the doctor has ordered to identify not only unlikely but highly improbable yet detrimental risks. Risk storming is very similar to brainstorming, where you and your team are trying to generate as many ideas as possible. Similar to brainstorming, quantity beats quality here – no risk is too ludicrous to mention. Hence, encourage your team to stay open-minded and avoid auto censorship. Ironically enough, the more nonsensical risk you generate, the more sense the exercise will make. On top of that, the fun factor alone will turn it into a mini team building.

On a practical note, the point is not to guess or guestimate which unpleasant surprise exactly will hit your project. Rather, it is to intensify the awareness that some scenario might materialize, and that surprise can come from all possible directions. One can also perceive this “exercise” in a very physical sense of the word – as backbends intend to increase your flexibility, this exercise is helping you to keep your mind open and prevent you from becoming rigid and moving in the tight rut of everyday predictability. This is vital, for as a good project and process manager you will have a general penchant for routines, checklists, and protocols.  So, the more improbable and unusual risks you identify, the better.

As the next step, you bring some order into this creative chaos: you go through the risks and evaluate them based on two dimensions – probability and impact. All the risks with low impact should get some acknowledgment, but they are not our primary focus here.

Whereas those that score high on probability and impact require concrete mitigation plans, the approach with “low probability, high impact” category differs. They will be so dispersed in their nature that the goal will be to bring things to a common denominator. For that, you can derive a “one size fits all” initial plan for all the catastrophic yet improbable scenarios you came up with in the first step. By no means does it have to be a default “pull the plug” algorithm – although for some projects it does make sense to define an exit criterion upfront. What you do need, however, is a generic action plan followed by a clear communication strategy if specific (unfavorable) criteria are met. These first steps should be clear prior to the departure – at a minimum, it saves you from losing time during an unexpected and adverse situation, which by itself can have a demoralizing impact and slow down your decision-making process. Moreover, this “script” limits the influence of emotions. If you want to make it more sophisticated, you can also group the scenarios based on what they will impact the most – time, budget, resources, etc. and have several generic plans depending on that.

As the final step, you implement a routine for the revision and actualization of the Log to keep your hand on the pulse of the ever-evolving body of a project and the potential gargantuan cost lurking behind shiny opportunities.