Risk Management

Identify, analyze, and respond to risks and opportunities before they become issues. Get a visual overview of all risks in the system and prioritize which items receive attention based on automatic risk factor calculations. Customize these calculations to reflect your project’s tolerance for risk, and automatically flag problem items using color-coding. Take a proactive and continuous approach to Risk Management.

What is Risk Management?

The PMI defines risk as: “An uncertain event or condition that has a positive or negative effect on a project’s objectives.” Basically, risk is any unexpected event that can affect your project — for better or for worse. Risk can affect anything: people, processes, technology, and resources.

Most people tend to think that risk implies a negative connotation. However, you’d be doing yourself a disservice if you looked at Risk Management through a pessimistic lense. In fact, you may want to take to calling it “opportunity management.” Call it whatever you want, but make sure it’s being managed. Both threats and opportunities will turn into issues if they are not dealt with proactively.

An effective Risk Management system must be able to identify, quantify, and predict the impact of risks before they happen. Our Risk Management solution can help you to visualize this process, plan your responses, and continuously review, revise and improve the procedure.

Identify and visualize risks

The first step to managing risk is to identify it. This must be a continuous process which is constantly updated to reflect market and company trends. Use the Risk Registry view to get a quick overview of all risks in the system.

Risk can affect anything: people, processes, technology, and resources. An essential part of dealing with risk is identifying what projects and initiatives the risk will affect. Use the Risk Related Entities board to visualize the items which will be affected by risks to help you judge the scope of potential impact.

Apptio TP Risk Registry — Registry: Risk Registry

Apptio TP Risk Related Entities — Related Entities

Apptio TP Qualitative Risk Analysis — Qualitative Risk Analysis

Risk-Residual-Probability-vs-Impact — Risk Residual Probability vs Impact

Assess and prioritize

Once you have identified all risks, you must assess which items merit action. Drag and drop risks on the impact and probability scale to automatically calculate the risk factor using the calculated custom field (probability*impact) in our Risk Factor view.

Don’t get distracted by low-priority risks. Perform qualitative analysis on risks to triage which items should receive attention. Use quantitative analysis to get an idea of the potential monetary impact of risks. Coloring-coding will alert you to whether a risk needs to be managed or watched. Customize these alerts and calculations to reflect your risk criteria and your project’s tolerance for risk.

Use reports to get in-depth details on risks and their potential impact. Compare the expected monetary value (EMV) of risks with the EMV of the items they affect with a Risk EMV Comparison bar graph. Use a scatter plot to visualize the probability and impact of all risks in the system to spot outliers and trends.

Plan your response

Develop your risk response plan to focus on enhancing opportunities while minimizing the potential impact of threats on project objectives. Drag and drop risks on the Risk Response view to assign responses to threats and opportunities. Our preset risk responses (Share, Exploit, Enhance, Reject, Avoid, Transfer, Reduce, Accept, Contingency) can be customized to match your specific needs.

Request a demo and see how Apptio Targetprocess can help you accurately plan, track, and forecast investments for agile or hybrid delivery.

Review, revise, improve

Use our Risk Dashboard to get an overview of the status and outcomes of your current risk response plan and quickly see where changes need to be made. Include the reports which are most useful for you, and easily share the Dashboard with customers and stakeholders.

Remember: it’s important to leverage risk by planning for threats and opportunities both early and often. Risk is not inherently negative. When risks are being actively addressed, they can be a benefit. If they are ignored, they will almost certainly have a negative effect.