Risk Management Approach

Here you can find a simple Risk Management Approach template in Microsoft Word/Excel format, along with explanation on how to use it.

Download the Template

Background

So, how are you going to manage risks in your project?

PRINCE2 has a theme about risk, which contains a lot of information, but my favorite is M_o_R^®, which is all about risk management in projects, programs, and portfolios (it comes from the same family as PRINCE2, and belongs to AXELOS), and I find it very well structured and practical. So, if you’re interested, I suggest reading the M_o_R manual and use that approach.

When you’re ready and have your risk management approach adjusted and tailored for the project, document it in this template. At that point, you will be describing the whole process, as well as defining the records in Risk Register and the scales that you will be using.

Similar to all other management approaches, it’s best to prepare them in the organization level (e.g. in the PMO) and make them available to all projects. Then each project can tailor and use it in the project instead of starting from scratch.

Composition

The template has these main sections:

Document information: this is the generic information about the document and connections with your Configuration Management system. Feel free to add more information here, but it’s best to keep it simple.
Approval: this section is for capturing approvals. There are multiple lines, because you may have multiple versions of this document approved. If you have a well-formed Configuration Management system to track approvals, feel free to remove this section.
The approach: you can use any well-formed approach to risk management (the don’t differ much), but you generally need to define these heading in the template. However, feel free to change them as long as what you’re doing is consistent with the rest of your system.

eLearning Courses

If you’d like to learn everything about PRINCE2, I can suggest our eLearning courses:

The first few lessons in each course are free. You can start taking the courses right now and make sure it’s what you’ve been looking for before you buy.

Note: The first 30% of the courses used to be free, but because of the recent constraints from PeopleCert, we’re not allowed to offer more than 15% of the scope or more than 90 minutes of the duration for free.