2.1             The Scope of Risk Management

 

Risk Management is applied in two major areas in an ICT environment:

 

·         New projects: When launching such projects, Risk Management is applied during all phases of each project.

 

·         Ongoing operations: When projects deliver products or services that become part of an ICT Unit’s regular operations, Risk Management is also applied to those operations.

 

The Project Management Institute’s Guidelines for Project Management cover 9 areas of knowledge that a Project Manager must master. One of these is Risk Management (Chapter 11). The approach of this segment is to use the 6 processes proposed by the Project Management Institute:

 

  1. Risk Management Planning: Prepares the Ministry or Agency for the procedures needed to manage risks.
  2. Risk Identification: Allows the Ministry or Agency to identify the various risks and categorize them according to a suitable and controllable structure.
  3. Qualitative Risk Analysis: Analyzes all risks and their impact going through a computational procedure to reach relative exposure of project or operation to the various risks.
  4. Quantitative Risk Analysis: Presents an additional set of quantitative techniques that supplement the main procedure in Qualitative Analysis.
  5. Risk Response Planning: Presents the processes needed to respond to every risk.
  6. Risk Monitoring/Control: Presents the procedures needed to monitor and track risks, revising the Risk Analysis Table and learning from the various results.

 

Note: This segment deviates from the PMI naming by changing the titles of the 3rd and 4th processes and reordering them. The new set becomes:

 

Process 1: Risk Management Planning

Process 2: Risk Identification

Process 3: Risk Analysis and the Risk Database

Process 4: Risk Response Planning

Process 5: Risk Monitoring/Control

Process 6: Additional Risk Analysis Tools and Techniques

 

In the next 6 main Sections, various Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and Guidelines will be presented for these processes.

 

The diagram in Section 2.5 shows the above processes, their sequence and the main documents they deal with.