This week, I’ll be posting a new series on Risk Management and it’s importance to overall project management.

It’s pretty easy to think of risk management as a drag, as a drain on your most precious resource: your own time. It’s not uncommon for a junior member of a project management team to be lumped with the task of updating the risk and issues registers, and this makes it even harder to take risk management seriously.

But take a minute to stop and think about it. What has the greatest potential to derail your project’s budget or schedule, or to compromise project scope? Simply put, the answer is unmanaged risk. Isn’t this just the sort of thing a project manager should keep an active eye on?

A risk to a project can be simply defined as a potential spanner in the works: an event or circumstance that, if it occurs, will affect your project’s budget, schedule and/or scope. Risk management is the active process of analysing project risks and managing their treatment.

In this series of posts, I’ll look at the purpose of risk management, and then will go a little deeper into how risk management can be done well. You might say that this aspect of project management has become a recent fascination of mine: it’s not really a surprise to me that the best project managers are usually the most adept risk managers.

Make sure you check out the rest of the series!