8 Risk Questions

Known globally as The Risk Doctor, David has been working in risk management for about 30 years. He has worked in 48 countries on every continent except the Antarctic (too cold!), with clients in most industries.

  ProjectsAtWork  

An effective risk management approach can be built from eight questions, each of which can be expanded into a risk process step.

What should a good risk management process cover? Anyone undertaking a risky or important venture should ask eight simple questions:

1.       What are we trying to achieve?

2.       What might affect us achieving this?

3.       Which of those things are most important?

4.       What shall we do about them?

5.       Have we taken action?

6.       Who needs to know?

7.       Having taken action, what has changed?

8.       What did we learn?

These questions describe the steps required to manage risk, and they can easily be expanded into a basic risk process, with one process step to answer each question:

1.      Getting started (process initiation). Risks only exist in relation to defined objectives, and these are what we are trying to achieve. We cannot start the risk process without first clearly defining its scope and clarifying which objectives are at risk. It is also important to know how much risk key stakeholders are …

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