What’s Your Risk Profile?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Risk Management   ProjectsAtWork  

A risk profile is a tool that can help organizations better understand their risk exposure, who “owns” it, where risk management effort and money is going, and their capacity to absorb risks. Here we take a closer look at this concept, including a sample risk profile template to help get you started.

In “No Risk Is An Island” (Nov. 25, 2013), we introduced the concept of risk capacity from a project, program and portfolio standpoint. This month we explore the concept of an organizational risk profile.

An organizational risk profile is a summary of all of the risks that an organization is exposed to, along with information on how much money and/or effort is being spent on risk management, how much financial and effort impact remains, and who owns it. Below is a sample version of the profile template:

The risk profile isn’t exclusively a project tool; it should be used to capture and document all of the risks that an organization is exposed to — both those inside the organization and those from outside. Some of those external risks can be hard to quantify, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist, and the fact that they are hard to quantify is itself a risk. Even the exercise of documenting all of those risks helps the organization to see just what kind of exposure they are dealing with — something many organizations …

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