The Importance of Identifying Risks

Kenneth has 14 years of healthcare experience in government and private industry. Over eight years of experience managing healthcare IT projects, operations, contracts, and personnel. His work experience includes project management, contracts and procurements, data analysis, claims adjudication, business writing, and business process modeling. Kenneth was certified in 2006 as a Project Management Professional.

  Risk Management  

Once a risk is managed, the mitigation and contingency steps become just one more task on a project manager’s to-do list--or better yet, someone else’s list. Before you can manage risks, though, you need to identify them so that they can be analyzed, discussed and mitigated.

The ability to identify risks should involve the entire project team, but normally the project manager will lead the effort and get the ball rolling. There are many different ways to identify risks that will pertain to the project, and the project manager should work through as many of them as are relevant to the project--and realistic for the project team.

Old Projects
The first step in identifying risks is to look at projects that are already completed. If a project is similar in nature to the present one, then you can review the documentation and the information that was captured about those projects. The risks that were identified for that project can be reviewed to determine if they could also be risks for the current project.

In addition, the issues that occurred will be a great resource for identifying risks that might occur in the present project. You need to identify those issues as risks before they occur and determine how to best mitigate them so that they do not turn into issues. Mitigating these types of risks can provide a great boost to the project from the very …

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