Introduction to Risk Identification

In the previous section, we took a detailed look at the “Risk Register”. But, if you had read the section carefully you could’ve spotted one gaping hole. Can you guess what it was?

Though we covered details like what a Risk Register is, what it contains etc. we never touched upon the topic of how we actually create the risk register. Isn’t it?

Well, if you spotted that then give yourselves a pat in the back, “Good Job”. If you missed it, then its ok. We have just begun our journey to be experts in Project Risk Management. So, its ok. Mistakes do happen…

Coming back to topic, the whole idea behind leaving out the “How to Create” part of the risk register was intentional. The Risk Register in itself as I have repeated time and again is one of the key aspects of Project Risk Management. A well-defined and comprehensive risk register is paramount for successful risk management in our project. So, I left out the create part on purpose so that we can take a detailed look at it in future.

In this section, we are going to cover in detail the “Identify Risks” process. We are going dig deep into this topic and learn about the inputs we will use to identify project risks, the techniques we will use to process those inputs in order to uncover all those potential risks that may affect our project. The output of this whole exercise or should I say section will be the “Risk Register”. A good risk register will outline or list down all possible risks that may affect the project no matter how big or small the risk impact will be. Our job here is to just identify all possible risks. We are not going to analyze them in detail here. That is what the subsequent sections on Qualitative and Quantitative risk analysis are for.

Without further delays, shall we get right down to business? The next chapter is going to be a detailed look at all the inputs we will be utilizing during the risk identification process.

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