Some Tips and Tricks using Risk Management in SpiraPlan

June 20th, 2019 by Adam Sandman

risk management

The theme this month is Risk Management, with the new functionality available in SpiraPlan v6.0 as well as the article on Risk Management in Agile Initiatives from Dr. Sriram Rajagopalan that we features earlier in the week. In this article we discuss some important tricks and tips from one of our key partners - Peter Brackstone from Influence IT Consulting in Brisbane, Australia.

Customizing Risk Types

Within the SpiraPlan risk management module, you can define different risk types, for example: business, financial, technical, legal, etc.

One common question, is how do you define different risk sub-types, such as:

  • Business Risk:
    • Brand
    • Reputation
    • Competition
    • H&S
    • Legal
    • Political
    • Reputational
    • Etc
  • Financial Risks:
    • Budget
    • Cost
    • Credit
    • Liquidity
    • Taxation
    • Etc.

You can define different risk workflows in a SpiraPlan product, so we would recommend creating one workflow per type:

Then you can associate the different risk types with the matching workflow:

With this in place, you can now create different custom properties and custom lists for each of the risk sub-types. These can then be made visible or hidden depending on which workflow is being used:

Adding Risk Determinations

In managing the Risks, as well as using the risk status (managed by the workflow), you may want to add risk determinations such as:

  • Accept
  • Avoid
  • Reduce
  • Tolerate
  • Share
  • Etc.

These can be modeled as another custom list property on the Risk artifact type:

If you would like to learn more?

If you would like to learn more about the subject of Risk Management and/or how to implement risk management best practices on your projects and programs, please attend Peter Brackstone's talk at InflectraCon 2019 in Cincinnati, Ohio.

 

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