Ultimately, your project is about delivering both the project and the benefits. Yet, repeatedly, we have found that projects overlook many of the common, systemic delivery risks; so we created this standard set to enable all project teams to assess risks on a comparable basis. 

However, this is not just a list of ‘common risks’ as it defines

• environmental risks - risks that color and weight the systemic risk scores to ensure an accurate risk profile is generated
• four risk levels for each risk so that all projects can score their risks on a common basis
• both current and target risk levels so that the gap can be assessed and tracked to realization. Risk management now has a goal
• a ‘delivery risk profile’ that can be updated as the project progresses.

The ‘environmental’ risks are characteristics of the project and how it is set up - they can only be mitigated by changing the project. They set the risk environment. There are three such risks for both project and benefits delivery.

The ‘systemic’ risks are present in almost every project - the only question is the level of exposure. Each risk has four pre-defined risk levels that can be selected as either the current or target risk level. Everyone is working off the same bases.

But, importantly, the use of the ‘target levels’ refocuses the effort from just ‘scoring the risk levels’ to ‘what do we have to do to reduce this risk exposure?’ It translates risk scoring into action!

This approach allows a comparable standard-based project delivery risk profile to be generated and updated quarterly to give the PPMO and governance team a view of whether the risk level of their project is declining as planned.

This Guide provides you with a simple but highly effective risk management approach to your delivery risks.

1. Understanding your delivery risks and profile
2. The end-to-end delivery risk management process
3. How to facilitate the delivery risks assessment workshop
4. How to compute your project’s delivery risk profile
5. How to confirm your project’s delivery risk environment
6. How to govern you delivery risk profile
7. How to manage the portfolio’s delivery risk profiles
8. How to generate a risk management action plan
9. How to manage your delivery risks
10. How to report delivery risks
11. How to govern delivery risks
12. How to conduct a post-project risk management review

• Project team - to understand the nature and types of ‘systemic delivery risks’ and how to manage them
• Governance team - to understand the nature of these systemic risks and how to govern them
• PPMOs - to understand the nature and contents of the resultant risk profiles that can be used to map the portfolio’s overall risk profile
• Auditors - to understand systemic risk management
• Project Investment Committee/Board - to understand systemic project risks
• Risk Management Officers - to understand how systemic project risks are managed

• Ensures commonly missed risks are considered
• Weights the risks on the basis of the environment the risks exist in
• Specifically addresses the risks to the successful delivery of the benefits and value
• Enables both the current and target risk level to be captured so that progress towards the target can be tracked
• Generates a standards-based comparable risk profile that allows cross-portfolio comparison

Coming soon