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Risk Management
Concept
As project leader, recognizing any pitfalls in planning is crucial to reducing the chances of last-minute adjustments that could adversely affect the overall project flow. Mitigation of risks is important before the risk becomes an issue. Once we have recognized the risk in advance, we need to evaluate it and take precautionary measures to reduce the likelihood of it occurring.
Tool
Risks Assessment Management System (RAMS)
It is a medium for the structured and disciplined documentation of all known risks in the project. It ensures no significant potential risk is ignored. Before implementation, certain risks are readily apparent to us and these are called known risks, while others would only be discovered while the project itself is being implemented, but they are still predictable. This tool consists of 3 steps.
1. Risk Identification
To be done as early as possible in the project and throughout the project life cycle.
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It is also one of the key topics in the regular project meetings.
2. Risk Evaluation
It is further broken down into 3 parts:
severity, likelihood of the risk and risk level.
For each part, give a rating of 1-5.
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a) Severity of the risk
1 being negligible consequences
5 being catastrophic
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b) Likelihood of the risk
1 being unlikely to happen but still possible
5 being almost certain that the risk is going to happen
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c) Risk Level
Multiply a &b
3. Risk Control / Mitigation
There are 4 ways to control the risk and you can choose either 1.
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i) Tolerate
Low Severity, Low Likelihood
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ii) Treat
Low Severity, High Likelihood
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iii) Transfer
High Severity, Low Likelihood
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iii) Terminate
High Severity, High Likelihood
Experiences
This is my first time creating RAMS chart. It is not difficult to understand and give ratings. I like that numbers are used to reflect the level of risk and this helps my teammates organize our thoughts because some of us are concerned about potential adverse risks. By using RAMS, it gave us a visual representation that we were underestimating our ability to resolve the potential risks we may foresee. Whenever we make a decision, it gave me , as a team leader, courage to voice my concerns without intimidating my teammates. Since RAMS is quite flexible to use, we have created 2 separate table so we can concentrate on different mitigation at different phrases of our project.
Values & Challenges
A few days before our first day of workshop, we came up with an idea to invite our collaborators, the Environmental Rangers Club (ERC) EXCO, to be our guest facilitators. My teammates were in dilemma and we did not use RAMS because we were unable to measure the severity and likelihood of the risk. We can not predict their availability as we do not know what other projects they are carrying out. The worst thing that could happen is the ERC would ignore our invitation. It's a risk for my team to take because we'll need to prepare materials for guest facilitators, such as the workshop timeline. We thought welcoming them would be too rush. Eventually, after having consulted with our lecturer, we decided to tolerate the risk because even if they are unable to attend our workshop, we can still carry out our workshop without making any major changes to our plan.
Workshop Day 1 with guest facilitator (ERC EXCO)
