Risk management is an integral part of project management and should be an ongoing activity through the lifecycle of a project. The risk plan should be well integrated into the overall project plan and clearly communicated.
Celoxis Risk Management allows you to
- Capture your risks and assign an owner to each
- Track your mitigation plans
- Capture information on your risks such as the Impact and Likelihood (probability of occurrence)
- Create a Risk Matrix which will allow you to focus on the critical ones
- Define a project Risk Register which reflects the inherent risk of the project
- Provide visibility to the team so they can contribute in case they find any missing risks
- Ensure uniform and consistent risk management - Define standard risks for different project categories (using project templates with relevant Risk Management sections). Your managers can then simply clone from those templates to ensure they have factored in the basic set of risks for that project category.
- Track risks according to their states – Hold (not occurred), Open (occurred), Closed (mitigated/passed on) are the default risk states. OR Alternately, you can define your own states on the Risks (call them Defined / Occurred / Mitigated).
Now let us see how you can implement Risk Management on your projects in Celoxis.
- Create a Summary Task called Risk Management as the last task in your project plan. Leaving it at the end ensures that the Risk Management section does not appear in the middle of your project plan. You can leave it collapsed if you wish.
- Define a Task Type called 'Risk'. To see how to define task types, please click here.
- Under task Risk Management, you can create tasks of ‘type = Risk’ to track your risks (i.e. Risk 1, Risk 2...).
- You can assign an owner to the Risk; were it to occur.
- Put these Risks in State=Hold (i.e. Risk has not occurred). If the Risk occurs, you can change the state to Open. When the risk is mitigated you can set the state of that risk to Closed. NOTE: The history of the state changes can be seen from the Audit Trail on the task
- Define your mitigation plan – i.e. Under each risk, you can define the tasks which need to be carried out if this risk were to occur. If you already know the resources who should work on the actual mitigation, assign those resources to the tasks. Put the mitigation plan (tasks) in state=HOLD.
- Risk Reviews should happen throughout the project. You can add to the list as new risks are identified. When you add new risks, you can keep the start date of the risk the date on which you added the risk. That helps you track when in the project life cycle the risk was identified.
- If a risk occurs, simply change the state of that risk to Open and in the field – Actual Start, enter the date on which the risk occurred.
- If there is a mitigation plan on the same with resources already assigned, put the tasks defined under it to state Task->Open from Task->Hold.
- As the resources work on the mitigation plan, they can continue to add to the tasks, put in progress updates on the same and even fill time.
