Two Risk Monitoring and Control Techniques

Professional consultant Gary Blair says that "Thoughtless risks are destructive, of course, but perhaps even more wasteful is thoughtless caution which prompts inaction and promotes failure to seize opportunity."

The thoughtful caution of risk monitoring and control helps you seize project opportunities and avoid destructive risks. By learning how to monitor and control these opportunities, you can boost their potential for success.

Two risk monitoring and control techniques can help you learn how to handle and control risks, increasing your chances of a successful project. The techniques are:

1. project risk response audits
2. periodic project risk reviews

To determine whether a risk owner has taken appropriate action to prevent a risk from occurring, you can use a project risk response audit. Risk response audits examine and document the effectiveness of the risk response and the risk owner. Risk response audits verify that those responsible conduct the responses as planned. You perform these audits throughout the project's life cycle to help control risk.

Companies must decide when they want to conduct risk response audits and under what circumstances. A company may decide to conduct an audit on risks with a potential cost to the project over a certain amount. This amount will vary from project to project, but will be set out at the beginning of the project.

To avoid biased results, you must have an objective third party conduct your risk response audits. Your company may have a risk specialist or internal audit department, otherwise it will have to hire an external auditor.

The second risk monitoring and control technique that can help you learn how to handle and control risks is periodic project risk reviews. Periodic project risk reviews are regularly scheduled examinations of potential risks. Since project risks are always changing, they should be an agenda item at all team meetings.

Depending on the phase of the project's life cycle, risk ratings and prioritization may change. If team members decide to change the risk rating or prioritization of a risk, they may have to perform additional qualitative or quantitative risk analyses.

Project risk response audits and periodic risk reviews keep track of project risks and how your team responds to them. This helps you handle and control risks properly and increases your chances of managing a successful project.