Source: Image of shopping cart, Public Domain, http://bit.ly/1cUoD3I; Image of arrow, Public Domain, Images by Video Scribe, License held by Jeff Carroll; Image of female project manager, Creative Commons, Kelly Eddington.
Hi, I'm Jeff. And in this lesson, we'll discuss how to plan for phase risks.
It's the project manager's responsibility to review all the risks and then determine which would be added to the risk registry. There are four major categories of risks and we'll review them next. These categories should help a project manager discover risks that might impact their project.
The first category is schedule risks. Almost any risk could impact the schedule, but schedule risks are issues with the actual development of the project schedule, such as risks associated with estimates or dependencies or issues that could occur along the critical path.
For example, a manager of a project with the goal to create a new shopping website for an organization will have tasks associated with payment processing. Now, if the organization has never done payment processing online before, then the time estimates for those tasks will have risks due to the lack of experience.
And this is what the risk would look like in the risk registry. Notice that is likely that this risk will occur due to the inexperience of the organization.
Another category of risk is with resources. These are any issues that might arise with people or with any other resource needed to complete the project. Creating a shopping website will require experienced programmers. If there is a risk that those programmers will not be available when needed, the risk should be documented in this manner.
The next category would be deliverable risks. As you might have guessed, these are risks with the actual deliverables. Perhaps they won't perform as expected or perhaps they will be issues of an organization is creating a deliverable with which they have little experience.
For example, our shopping website project will need reliable backup systems as a deliverable. There's a risk that the equipment chosen fails to operate as needed, and the risk should be documented in this way.
Finally, there are assumption risks. When creating a project scope, certain assumptions are made about a project. If there are risks with those assumptions, then they should be documented like this. As you can see, the shopping project assume that PayFast would be the method used for all payment processing.
However, if a decision is made to change from that system, there will be an impact to the project in schedule and cost. It might be a low probability that this change occurs, but it's a medium impact if it does.
The project manager should review the project scope, schedule, and plan to discover any risks, such as the ones we just discussed. They should consider anything that might impact the time, cost, or scope of a project. Remember, any impact to one of those variables will likely impact the other two.
All right. Nicely done. In this lesson, you learned how to plan for different phase risks. You can now recognize schedule risks, resource risks, deliverable risks, and assumption risks. And you know how to document each in the risk registry.
Thanks for listening and have a great day.
