Whenever you start or manage a project, it’s important to assess what risks may be involved and determine some mitigation strategies to help your project be successful.

Using a Risk Assessment Matrix helps you to uncover potential issues, determine the impact of those issues and develop mitigation strategies to minimise the impact of those risks.

Definitions

• risk assessment (noun)
  a process of evaluating the potential risks that may impact a project or activity
• mitigate (verb)
  make something less severe or serious and reduce it’s overall negative impact

How to

Use the risk matrix to understand how a particular issue impacts your business.

High-impact and high-likelihood risks should be prioritise and resolved first.

1. Work with your team to identify project risks, listing everything you think is possible
2. Categorise the risks by the type of impact – staff, customers, business productivity, etc
3. Provide weightings for each risk to determine the impact
4. Develop mitigation strategies that can help prevent or minimise the risk