Apple product users. Have you ever prepared a beautiful presentation? Your slide deck carefully crafted for your exclusive audience who read your website consistently, your images are relevant and funny, and you feel on top of the world only to find the venue doesn't have a VGA adapter for the projector. This is EXACTLY why we need to complete risk assessments before we start any projects.

If that's not enough for you to worry about, here's another example. You are running a fancy event at a new venue. Contract is signed, you start planning and a few months later the big day is here! It is 6PM, your event starts. The room is tastefully decorated, the guests are mingling, and someone knocks over a candle, lighting a divider curtain on fire. A raging fire starts and people are tripping over one another to escape, champagne glasses crash to the floor spilling liquids on the ground and in all of this a woman wearing red bottoms falls and is badly injured in addition to having people run past her towards safety. Fire fighters and ambulances come, to help save the day. A week later, you receive a subpoena because the lady that fell is suing you for not having enough insurance coverage to help her with her surgery and her recovery time. This is something you could avoid and prevent from happening in many ways. So, let's not get you sued shall we?

There is a local granting body called Ontario Trillium Foundation that requires a risk assessment as a part of their grant applications. In my opinion, they are ahead of the curve with this requirement because it helps the grantee think of all the possible risks that could pop-up along a project. Below is a great video to get you started.

1. Get the list

   • Get EVERYONE (your project team, some end users, project sponsor, etc.) in a room together and identify a bunch of risks.

   • I recommend starting with "doomsday" level risks, so negative risks then doing "sunshine" risks, AKA positive risks

   • Here is a list of themes for you to think about.

2. Assign likelihood and impact

   • Gather your project team this time and rate the likelihood of each risk happening as Low, Medium, High (or 1-5 the scale is your choice)).

   • Do the same thing with your impact, rate it as Low, Medium, or High (or 1-5 or 0%-100%). When thinking about the impact, I would recommend you think about how the risk could affect your time, cost, scope, and quality (the triple constraint).

     • If you want a refresher on the triple constraint, check out this article "As an Artist, Why should I care about the Triple Constraint?"

3. Develop mitigation strategies

   • Again, do this with your project team.

   • Start from the scariest risk, the one where it will feel like an apocalypse.

   • Work your way down to less scary and shift gears into positive risks, those warm fluffy sunshine risks.

     • If you want a recap on how to mitigate NEGATIVE risks, check out this article.

     • If you want to learn more about how to capitalize on POSITIVE risks, check out this article.

4. Quantify mitigation & quantify impact

   • Now we have to make it feel real and add some numbers to each risk. Let's take the laptop example from before:

     • Mitigation cost: It could cost $0 if you have one at home or if the venue already had one. If you had to go to a store, buy it, and come back that could cost you a minimum of $40 for the cable, plus gas.

     • Impact cost: If you had a room of 50 people, who paid $25 each, that is $1250 in gross profits, he venue rental cost was $200 for 2 hours, refreshments were $150, and having security be on-site cost $240. That's a net profit of $660. You are excited because this only took a 5 hours to put this together (3 hours pre-workshop and 2 hours in the workshop) for $132/hr of work.

     • But because of this laptop issue, 8% of the people wanted a refund because they had to wait 30 minutes. This brings your net profit down to $560. Which doesn't seem like much but your hourly rate has dropped to $101/hr. Additionally, you received mostly good feedback from the workshop but two of the 4 people who wanted a refund gave a scalding review of you on Facebook, lowering the amount of website clicks thus lowering the amount of google ad sense revenue you receive per month from $100 to $80.

     • If this mishap didn't happen, you could be getting $660 in workshop profits and $1200 in ad revenue (a total of $1860), but because of all of the sucky things it resulted in $560 workshop profits and $960 in ad revenue (totaling $1520, that's a $340 difference - that's half of my monthly rent boo).

     • If you planned ahead, this whole thing would cost you ZERO dollars.

     • TBH, quantifying mitigation and impact doesn't have to be this detailed, but if you want to do it all power to you!

Here is a FREE RISK REGISTER TEMPLATE for you to use:

Google Spreadsheets Version | Excel Version