Project Management - How to Analyse Project Risks

This course is a result of 25 years of consulting project management experience, identifying, analyzing and assessing various project risks.

This course will explain what is a risk as well, how it can be handled (mitigation, avoidance, acceptance and transference) as well as what techniques can be used in order to analyze risks. We will look at both qualitative and quantitative methodologies for risk analysis.

Qualitative methodologies examined will include Probability Impact Matrix that assesses risk probabilities and impacts and Risk Ranking table that ranks risks according to their “High”, “Medium” or “Low” levels of impact.

Quantitative Risk Analysis procedures discussed will include Three-Point Estimate, Decision Tree Analysis and Expected Monetary Value (EMV) approaches. The three-point estimate method relies on the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) where a project manager can calculate the mean and the standard deviation for the project duration (or effort/budget) and provide 84.1%, 99.7% or 99.9% confidence levels for his/her estimates.

A Decision Tree Analysis is a graphic representation of various alternative solutions that are available to solve a problem. A Decision Tree Analysis is created by answering a number of questions that are continued after each affirmative or negative answer until a final choice can be made.

I will also share sample risk lists from several projects I worked on and discuss them in detail.