Driving Clarity in Risk Assessment

In this chapter, we’ll discuss the risk management process and the type of risks that a TPM may deal with in a technology landscape. We’ll dive into the risk assessment process in greater detail and see how to successfully catalog project and program risks and methods to reduce or remove their impact.

We’ll dive into risk management by covering the following topics:

• Driving clarity in risk assessment

• Managing risks in a technology landscape

• Exploring the differences between a project and a program

Understanding the risk assessment process

Previously, we discussed the cyclical relationship between project planning and risk assessment. Now, we’ll drive clarity in terms of what risk assessment is and how we continue to manage risk throughout the project’s lifecycle.

Risk assessment starts as soon as you have enough information to start assessing, which can be early on in the project. If you start with a project in a domain that you know very well, a single paragraph about the goal of the project may be enough to start analyzing risks. In other cases, where the domain or project itself is too vague, it may take a full requirements document to start analyzing, which is in itself a risk!

Regardless of when the process starts, the steps are the same. Part of the process was outlined previously, but the full process has two additional steps that the figure below outlines: