All projects carry risks of unexpected events that may cause the project to be delayed or even killed off. For example, unavailable expertise, rising costs, insufficient time, low moral and differing expectations. To enable a proactive approach to the delivery of a project a project manager ensures that the risks and issues are constantly assessed, reviewed, scored and monitored. This enables the early capture of potential change and provides time to log, assess, cost and identify various mitigating actions that will either remove or reduce the risks.

Within an organisation, risk assessment and management helps you to think ahead and to balance the risk against your current plans. For example, you may decide to move premises, there may be a risk that staff would be unable to work to full potential whilst they are occupied with the move, this may impact on customer service, at worst, resulting in the loss of customers. You need to identify the risks and then plan to minimise the likelihood of the risk happening and reduce the impact if it does. In this example, you may decide to employ the services of Swift Project Management Services Ltd!