Moving Past Risk Analysis

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   Schedule Management   Scheduling   Scope Management  

Risk analysis is a wonderful tool for project managers; it lets the project put together solid information about the risks that could occur during the project. Risk analysis helps everyone involved with the project understand the risks that have been identified. Anyone on the project can come up with potential risks, and the project management team often needs to help do the analysis so that there will be a good understanding of the impact and probability of the risk.

Once all of that information is obtained, though, it is time to push past the risk analysis and manage the risks for the project.

Analysis Paralysis
The first threshold between risk analysis and risk management is oftentimes the paralysis that occurs during analysis. The nature of risks is that they are issues or possibilities that might or might not occur, and there are times where a good analysis is difficult to pin down. The impact could vary depending upon how the risk will occur, or the probability is dependent on so many different things that no one can agree on what metric to use for it.

The best way to move past analysis paralysis is to have the correct decision makers in a position to make the decisions. The team can come up with all the scenarios they want to, but a key stakeholder (or small group of key stakeholders) should be able to make a firm decision about the risk impact and …

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