Practical Risk Management for Business and Projects

One of the most significant problems confronting any business or project is the uncertainty of the future – not knowing what the future will bring.

A good business or project manager needs to look to the future and be prepared to respond to it. They need to identify opportunities and potential problems and, where necessary, address these to manage their impact on their business or project.

What can you do to better understand and respond to the future?

The answer is risk management.

Risk management is a process that is critical to the success of most human endeavours. Effective risk management is used to predict potential problems and opportunities and address them proactively, if required, to improve success.

I’ve been managing operations, business and projects for well over 35 years, and during that time I’ve come to rely on risk management to effectively and successfully manage the operations, businesses and projects I have led.

During this time, I’ve also encountered considerable push back from employees, team members and key stakeholders regarding their involvement in risk management. Many of these people are either unable or not interested in effectively participating in risk management.

I believe this is because many do not know how to effectively manage risks and therefore shy away from getting involved.

This course is intended to help people that do not have a thorough understanding of risk management to increase their risk management knowledge and experience to enable them to become better risk managers.

This is a practical, hands-on course. It covers more than just the knowledge of risk management. In addition to risk management theory, you will be challenged, through 13 distinct scenario based practical exercises, to perform the critical risk management processes of identifying,  scoring and prioritizing risks, and determining and defining risk response options to address the risks you identify as well as documenting and reporting these risks.

By the end of this course you will be able to effectively identify, prioritize and respond to risks and maintain a comprehensive risk register. You will be a better risk manager!

Risk management is not a one-person job. If you are a manager, whether it be a operations, business, project manager, you will need to involve your employees, team members and important stakeholders in the management of risks if you expect to do it effectively and successfully.

Being able to lead others in risk management is the second benefit of this course that I believe you will appreciate. This course will provide you with the tools and techniques you can and should use to lead and assist others to manage risks. You will come out of this course not only being a better risk manager, but you will also be able to help others to manage risks.

What will you learn?

You will learn the principal techniques and tools needed to effectively manage risks and support others to manage risk. The risk management tools and techniques used in this course are derived from the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), ISO 31,000 Risk Management guidelines and other sources.

The techniques and tools you will learn include the standard risk management processes of:

• creating a risk management plan and establishing a risk management environment,

• identifying risks,

• declaring risks,

• scoring and prioritizing risks,

• identifying and defining risk response options, and

• tracking and reporting risks.

• You will learn how to clearly and succinctly declare risks statements using a three-part format.

• You will learn 14 unique risk identification tools and techniques and you will practice 8 of these through hands-on exercises.

• You will learn the standard risk response options and you will practice defining these in 3 hands-on exercises.

• You will learn how to identify and determine contingency to effectively respond to risks.

• You also learn key risk management terms and roles.

• As an added bonus you will be provided with a detailed Risk Register and a scoring and reporting Heat Map, in Excel, to document and report your risks.

Who is this course intended for?

This course is intended for anyone who wishes to become experienced in risk management. It is designed for both new and experienced managers, employees, team members and other business and project stakeholders. The course will also help you understand PMI’s PMBOK risk management knowledge area.