Monitoring and Controlling Risk

Project risk control and risk monitoring is where you keep track of about how your risk responses are performing against the plan as well as the place where new risks to the project are managed.

You must remember that risks can have negative and positive impacts. Positive risk is a risk taken by the project because its potential benefits outweigh the traditional approach and a negative risk is one that could negatively influence the cost of the project or its schedule.

The purpose of project risk control is to

• Identify the events that can have a direct effect in the project deliverables.
• Assign qualitative and quantitative weight—the probability and consequences of those events that might affect the project deliverables.
• Produce alternate paths of execution for events that are out of your control or cannot be mitigated.
• Implement a continuous process for identifying, qualifying, quantifying, and responding to new risks.

The main goals to risk monitoring and control:

• To confirm risk responses are implemented as planned.
• To determine if risk responses are effective or if new responses are needed.
• To determine the validity of the project assumptions.
• To determine if risk exposure has changed, evolved, or declined due to trends in the project progression.
• To confirm policies and procedures happen as planned.
• To monitor the project for new risks.
• To monitor risk triggers

Risk triggers are those events that will cause the threat of a risk to become a reality. For example, you have identified the fact that you only have one pump set available and the replacement takes six weeks to arrive. In the middle of your irrigation and recycling process tests, you discover that water pressure tends to fluctuate beyond pump tolerance levels. If you do not find a way to solve this problem, your risk will become a reality.

Make sure that for each identified risk, you must provide a response plan. It is not much help to you if the risk becomes a reality or issue and you do not have an alternate execution path or some other emergency procurement plan.

Main inputs to effectively monitor and control risks:

• Risk management plan
• Risk Register / Risk Tracker
• Risk response plan
• Project communications
• New risk identification
• Scope changes

Outputs of Risk Monitoring and Risk Control:

• Workaround plans
• Corrective / Preventive actions
• Change requests
• Risk response plan updates
• Risk database
• Checklist updates