FMEA or Risk Analysis ?

FMEA is a structured approach tailored towards products, processes, and services through analysis of the system of interest so it is one type of risk analysis. It is really intended around systems which may be well defined and of a mechanistic nature.

Project management is comprised of many systems, or even a System of System where are system elements are not centrally controlled. That makes it an open system interacting with the larger environment than the products and processes. The project team is influenced by external systems like society and economics which are very difficult to characterize. As a classic example, entropy always increases in closed systems per the 2nd law of thermodynamics, but not in open systems where organisms grow and societies organize.

While FMEA is great for analyzing your process flows and the product architecture delivered by the project, other approaches should be used to evaluate risks relative to the larger business environment like customer and employee satisfaction.

It depends on the nature of project and the depth of your FMEA. Generally speaking, Risk Management is more than FMEA. However, you can do a FMEA which covers all risks associated with a project. Size, complexity and final/main deliverables of the project play a key role.

Thank you Keith, as far as it gets FMEA will only take into consideration Failure Modes, no opportunities would be spotted along the cursus. That's why, I prefer using Risk Management process to cover as much risks as we can.

I do like the inclusion of FMEA within the risk management approach for certain projects as it does provide greater depth in prioritizing risks by including the Detection dimension which is not usually incorporated into the typical probability x impact approach of qualitative risk analysis.

Kiron

Iheb

I do agree with my fellow colleagues, and while FMEA adds value, yet, it is not enough to be used on its own especially when you want to identify opportunities and run quantitative analysis so I highly recommend using full risk analyss including FMEA.

RK

Thanks Rami for your feedback, I totally agree with you.
It is a complementary tool that stays always under the Scope of Risk Management. Nevertheless, can be used as a quick list, categorization tool, and prioritization tool to ease up the rest of the Qualitative Analysis.