8. Assess risks, and prepare action plans

• Brainstorm a list of everything that could go wrong with your project.
• Use your team and the reviews from other projects to get the longest list possible.
• For each possible problem, assess how likely it is to happen and how serious it would be. Multiplying a rating for each allows you to prioritise the risks, or have a cut-off point below which you ignore them.
• For each possible problem, find ways to make it less likely to happen (by tackling the cause or causes). These preventative actions should be built into your project plan.
• For each possible problem, find ways to make it less serious if it does happen. This involves having back-up plans ready. You need to cover all of the possible effects of the problem which may occur.
• Only show your customer the external risk plan – they don’t need to know about potential internal problems.
• Make sure there’s enough contingency in terms of time and money to cover the likely risks.
• Remember that the purpose of contingency is not to make life easy for you, but to ensure that the project comes in on time and to budget – in other words, to make the customer happy.
• This is the end of the planning phase. All of the above actions need to be done before you agree to take the project on.
• The actions that follow are for the implementation part of the project