Project Risk Assessment Strategies for Teams

Risk Management Made Simple: A Straightforward Approach for Every Project Manager Risk management is crucial to project success, yet it's often seen as complex and intimidating. Here’s a simple approach to managing risks in your projects: 1/ Identify Risks Early: → Start with a risk brainstorm: technical, operational, financial, and external risks. → Collaborate with your team to identify potential threats and opportunities. → Involve diverse team members to gain different perspectives on possible risks. → Use historical data and past project experiences to spot risks that may arise again. 2/ Assess and Prioritize: → Use a risk matrix to assess impact and likelihood. → Prioritize high-impact risks that could derail your project’s success. → Make sure you reassess risks periodically to capture any changes in impact or probability. → Don’t forget to consider opportunities as well—these should be prioritized, too! 3/ Develop Mitigation Plans: → For each priority risk, develop a strategy to minimize or avoid it. → Plan for contingencies to stay prepared for the unexpected. → Ensure the mitigation plans are realistic and actionable. → Set up early-warning systems so you can act quickly if needed. 4/ Assign Ownership: → Assign a team member to own each risk, ensuring accountability. → Ensure they track progress and adjust strategies as necessary. → Empower the risk owner with resources and authority to implement mitigation plans. → Ensure a straightforward escalation process if the risk owner needs help. 5/ Monitor and Update Regularly: → Schedule regular risk reviews and status updates. → Keep an eye on emerging risks and adjust plans as your project evolves. → Maintain an open feedback loop with stakeholders on the evolving risk landscape. → Use project management tools to automate risk tracking and reminders. 6/ Communicate Effectively: → Keep stakeholders informed about risk status and changes. → Be transparent about potential impacts and solutions. → Ensure communication is clear and consistent across all levels of the team. → Adjust your communication style based on your stakeholders' needs and preferences. Managing risk doesn’t have to be complicated. Focus on 𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗳𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴, 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘇𝗶𝗻𝗴, and 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗹𝘆; you'll set your project up for success. What’s one risk management tip you live by? Let’s share some wisdom!

Most projects fail. But there’s a simple technique to give yours a fighting chance. It’s not a to-do list. It’s not a fancy tool. It’s not a 12-step system. It’s a single question that flips the way you think. Here’s how it works: It’s called a “premortem.” You’ve heard of a postmortem what went wrong after a project dies. A premortem asks: What if we ran that analysis now? Before anything dies. Before the first misstep. Before failure sets in. The premortem comes from psychologist Gary Klein. Here’s how to run one: → Gather your team. → Imagine it’s 2 years in the future. → The project has completely failed. → Ask: What went wrong? No sugarcoating. No happy talk. Start listing the causes of failure. Budget misfire? Wrong team? Lack of buy-in? Scope creep? Missed deadlines? You’ll be shocked how quickly people identify risks—once they feel safe predicting failure. Why this works: It defeats irrational optimism. • It turns hindsight into foresight. • It makes risk visible. • It aligns the team before chaos hits. Because the best time to fix a problem… is before it happens. Pre-mortems don’t require special skills. Just a shift in mindset: Don’t assume success. Assume failure—and reverse-engineer your way out. Ask: What will future-you wish you had done? Then… do that now. I run a premortem for every big project I take on. Writing a book? Premortem. Launching a podcast? Premortem. Planning an event? Premortem. It never guarantees success—but it always makes success more likely. Summary: The Premortem Playbook → Imagine future failure. → List the causes. → Turn those risks into action steps. → Adjust your plan today. It’s one of the most underrated tools in your productivity toolkit. Try it before your next project. You won’t regret it.

Here's my cheat sheet for a first-pass quantitative risk assessment. Use this as your “day-one” playbook when leadership says: “Just give us a first pass. How bad could this get?” 1. Frame the business decision - Write one sentence that links the decision to money or mission. Example: “Should we spend $X to prevent a ransomware-driven hospital shutdown?” 2. Break the decision into a risk statement - Identify the chain: Threat → Asset → Effect → Consequence. Capture each link in a short phrase. Example: “Cyber criminal group → business email → data locked → widespread outage” 3. Harvest outside evidence for frequency and magnitude - Where has this, or something close, already happened? Examples: Industry base rates, previous incidents and near misses from your incident response team, analogous incidents in other sectors 4. Fill the gaps with calibrated experts - Run a quick elicitation for frequency and magnitude (5th, 50th, and 95th percentiles). - Weight experts by calibration scores if you have them; use a simple average if you don’t. 5. Assemble priors and simulate - Feed frequencies and losses into a Monte Carlo simulation. Use Excel, Python, R, whatever’s handy. 6. Stress-test the story - Host a 30-minute premortem: “It’s a year from now. The worst happened. What did we miss?” - Adjust inputs or add/modify scenarios, then re-run the analysis. 7. Deliver the first-cut answer - Provide leadership with executive-ready extracts. Examples: Range: “10% chance annual losses exceed $50M.” Sensitivity drivers: Highlight the inputs that most affect tail loss Value of information: Which dataset would shrink uncertainty fastest. Done. You now have a defensible, numbers-based initial assessment. Good enough for a go/no-go decision and a clear roadmap for deeper analysis. This fits on a sticky note. #riskassessment #RiskManagement #cyberrisk

If you're in the business of leading projects, then at least 10% of your time should be spent on identifying and planning around risks. At least, this is what I was taught in my first PMI project management course years ago. And while reasonable people can disagree on the specific amount of time needed, the point is solid - one of the major roles anyone in production or program management type roles is assigned to take on is risk assessment and mitigation. Unfortunately, for a lot of producers in the game industry, this isn't something they were formally trained on, particularly if you came into the role from another discipline in games (such as QA or Design) or if your only formal training came from a two day Scrum course. I saw the subject come up in the Building Better Games Q&A call and I was actually excited when Aaron Smith brought up the same techniques I was trained on years ago and have adopted (and adapted) ever since. It's the way I teach my own teams and while it requires dilligence and consistency, it's not hard to pick up (it's easier than the rules for the board game "Risk"). 1 - Identify risks On a regular basis, you should be asking your team what are the risks they see. Every time a decision needs to be made, a story is written, or a feature is spec'd, you should think about what could go wrong. Those are your risks. 2 - Document Keep the risks written down in a doc everyone has access to (Gdocs, Confluence, etc). The way I prefer (and what I saw Aaron advocating) is a spreadsheet. Each risk gets a line item and a category (if the risk happens, what would be impacted - costs? security? people? players?). 3 - Impact You should also track the potential impact - how bad is this risk if it happens? Is it a trivial risk or a catastrophic one? Would it involve some work to reboot a service or would it potentially take down your entire data center? Assign these risks a score. I prefer 1 to 5, Trivial to Catastrophic. 4 - Probability You should score out how likely each risk is to occur. Is it highly unlikely or nearly certain? Score these out also on the same scale, typically 1 to 5. 5 - Prioritize Multiply the Impact and Probability to come up with your score, somewhere between 1 (something trivial that is highly unlikely) to 25 (a nearly certain, catastrophic event) and then sort or at least color range your spreadsheet accordingly to show your risks in a way that prioritizes your attention. 6 - Action Plans The last column I make sure to include is what type of plan is in place to address the risk. Something with a minor impact may be something we just accept where something more serious may require a full mitigation plan. The value here is that you've documented these risks and can communicate them out (as well as what needs doing). You're addressing risks before they become real problems in this way. #production #risks #gamedev #bettergames