So let’s start with developing an understanding of what risk management means to the general populus. What is Risk Management?

Wikipedia, with some modifications of my own, describes it as:

Risk management is the human activity which integrates recognition of risk, risk assessment, developing strategies to manage it, and mitigation of risk using managerial resources.

The strategies include transferring the risk to another party, avoiding the risk, reducing the negative effect of the risk, and accepting some or all of the consequences of a particular risk.

Objective of risk management is to reduce different risks related to a project to the level accepted by the project board/managing organisation. It may refer to numerous types of threats caused by environment, technology, human resource and politics.

This is a pretty good description. Remember it.

There is one point I’d like to make before we go too far into the article. Whilst there are obvious negative connotations with the word risk this process can be equally applied to ‘opportunities’. Instead of trying to mitigate the impact or probability of opportunities you might want to ‘enhance’ them to magnify the potential benefits. When you read this article try to keep this in mind and apply those same RM principles to OM (opportunity management).

So, the first question I’m sure you’re asking is: “Where do I start?”…at the beginning of course….the beginning of the project…