Risk Management Plan Template & Example: Download Our Free Document Today
Modern software runs in much more hostile and complex environments than it did a decade ago. From new attack surfaces to cutting-edge technological innovation with potential for misuse, the risk of system failure is rapidly increasing. AI systems introduce model bias, data poisoning, and other risks, while diverse deployment targets (cloud, IoT, serverless, etc.) multiply configurations and patching risks. The bottom line is that today’s systems absolutely necessitate risk programs that are not only structured, but traceable and aligned to modern standards.
We’re not going to cover the basics of what risk management is in this article — for more background on this topic, see our article: What is Risk Management?
What is a Risk Management Plan?
As the name suggests, a risk management plan is a document that defines how your team will identify, evaluate, respond to, monitor, and report on risks across a product or project. This encompasses the full lifecycle, clarifying and documenting:
- Risk scope
- Risk boundaries
- Risk ownership
- Decision-making ownership
- Risk identification methods
- Risk assessment methods
- Artifacts (e.g. risk register, threat models, etc.)
- Risk reporting cadence
- Escalation pathways
What is the Purpose of a Risk Management Plan?
An RMP exists to create a repeatable and auditable process for handling risks, prioritizing resources via impact and probability analysis, and aligning stakeholders on acceptable risks. This means that decisions aren’t made ad hoc, team members understand their roles and responsibilities, and monitoring and escalation are defined before a risk turns into an actual problem.
Benefits & Importance of a Risk Management Plan
There are a variety of benefits and reasons to implement an effective risk management plan, including:
- Better Prioritization: Risks are scored more consistently, making it easier and faster to rank and categorize items so that engineering teams can more accurately allocate efforts to the highest value mitigations. This leads to less time debating subjective rankings, and more time sprint planning and on high-value tasks.
- Clear Accountability: Assigning an owner, mitigation due date, and status to each risk creates visible follow-through and easier handoffs between teams. The result is far fewer “no one’s responsible” gaps that could exacerbate risks or create incidents in the future.
- Enhanced Compliance: Mapping risks to controls with your risk management plan improves audit readiness and shortens audit cycles. This demonstrates due diligence to both regulators and customers, which is essential for regulated sectors that must show a documented risk program.
- Fewer Surprises: Pre-defined triggers, runbooks, and contingency plans in your risk management plan all contribute to minimizing unexpected risks. On top of this, it helps the team respond and recover faster when risks do present themselves, reducing MTTR and business impact.
- Preparedness for Emerging Tech: Risk management plans present the opportunity to embed checks for specific emerging risk areas, such as AI and quantum computing. This leads to more thorough multi-year remediation paths instead of reactive firefighting.
However, it’s critical to note that risk management plans stored as a static text document can quickly become out-of-date. Because of this, teams will need to continually update, govern, and re-evaluate the plan to prevent a false sense of security. Alternatively, instead of using a template, you could invest in a dedicated risk management tool that automates these processes and keeps information current. See our list of the best enterprise risk management software here.
What Should Be Included In a Risk Management Plan?
The most important sections and components you should include in a risk management plan are:
|
Risk Management Plan Sections |
What the Section Does/Includes |
|
Scope & Context |
Defines systems, environments, teams, and business domains the plan covers, as well as any constraints or boundaries for risk-management efforts. |
|
Risk Governance & Roles |
Specifies who is responsible for risk tasks, escalation paths, and which stakeholders are informed or consulted. |
|
Risk Taxonomy & Definitions |
Groups risks by category and creates consistent definitions for likelihood and impact scales. |
|
Risk Identification Methods |
Describes how you will find risks, such as through threat modeling, design reviews, dependency scans, etc. |
|
Assessment & Prioritization |
Lays out the risk scoring method, how to compute risk severity, and how to calculate residual risk after controls. |
|
Controls & Mitigation Strategies |
Outlines chosen responses, control measures, who owns, and how you’ll verify each risk. |
|
Risk Register & Log |
Organizes risk items in a table, including descriptions, scores, owners, triggers, mitigation actions, current status, and evidence. |
|
Monitoring & Metrics |
Clarifies how you’ll track risks over time, such as KPIs, reporting cadence, status updates, and how you’ll re-evaluate control effectiveness. |
|
Communications & Escalation Plan |
Details how and when to report risk status, who gets notified on what severity, and how to escalate emerging critical risks. |
|
Integration with SDLC & Tools |
Explains how risk activities tie into your development lifecycle so risk work isn’t separate from engineering. |
|
Review & Maintenance |
Defines when and how the plan gets reviewed, updated, and validated (e.g. after incidents, quarterly, etc.). |
Risk Management Plan Template
To make it easier to start your risk management plan, we’ve created a free downloadable template to use or reference for your next product or project:
Download our pre-built risk management plan template here:
Benefits of Using a Risk Management Plan Template
While we’ve discussed the advantages of implementing a risk management plan in general, there are also benefits of specifically using a template document:
- Pre-Mapped Compliance: A good template can include sections that map to standards like ISO 31000 or sector-specific guidance. This means you ensure that the fields auditors and officers expect are included.
- Consistent Risk Scoring: Templates usually maintain the same likelihood and impact scales/categories, so each risk is scored and prioritized the same. This also ensures cross-project comparability, which is crucial for portfolio priorization.
- Pre-Defined Playbook: Once you’ve tailored a template and used it a few times, it begins to develop its own playbook of common mitigations and snippets. Teams don’t have to reinvent basic responses, saving time via standardization.
- Easier Onboarding & Handoffs: Templates reduce the variability and learning curve for new teams or contractors creating registers. Having a common structure cuts down on training friction and keeps information more consistent.
Risk Management Plan Example: Medical Device Software
Using the risk management plan template detailed above, we’ve filled out each section with information from a medical device example, so you can see what a real (hypothetical) risk management plan might look like:
When writing a risk management plan (either using a template or not), we recommend following these steps:
- Define Scope & Stakeholders: List all of the systems and environments covered, then invite product, engineering, security, legal, and ops teams to a kickoff.
- Select Taxonomy & Scoring Model: Choose your preferred likelihood and impact scales, as well as risk categories (e.g. security, compliance, availability, etc.), and document them in the plan.
- Identify Risks: Run workshops that use different methods to identify potential risks (e.g. scenario brainstorming, architecture threat modeling, supply chain review, etc.) and capture all of the risks in your register.
- Assess & Prioritize: Apply your scoring model to the identified risks, tagging “must-fix before release” items, and converting top risks into user stories.
- Define Mitigation & Controls: For each critical/high risk, specify the mitigation. Owner, verification method, tracked artifact, and detection/recovery actions.
- Map to Standards: Document which standard (or control) each mitigation satisfies, such as the NIST control ID, ISO objective, or AI RMF function.
- Embed Into the SDLC: Add gating rules to CI, require threat model approval for major features, and include risk reviews in release checklists.
- Establish Monitoring: Choose KPIs and decide on a dashboard/reporting cadence for tracking these metrics.
- Regularly Review: Run period reviews (we recommend quarterly), as well as post-incident retrospectives ato to update likelihood/controls and validate assumptions.
Take Your Risk Management Plan to the Next Level with SpiraPlan
As we mentioned earlier, templates are a great starting point but can only carry you so far — especially for a constantly changing area like risk management. While these documents might suffice for smaller teams in lenient sectors, most modern companies should consider investing in (or upgrading) their risk management system. SpiraPlan is a cutting-edge platform for enterprises looking to enhance their risk management, portfolio management, and overall SDLC management. It also comes with our powerful generative intelligence engine, Inflectra.ai, which seamlessly scales for large teams by automating:
- Test case generation from requirements
- Task generation from requirements
- BDD scenario generation from requirements
- Possible risk identification from requirements
- Possible risk mitigation suggestions from requirements
- and much more
Learn more about SpiraPlan’s industry-leading capabilities here, or hear from our partners about what makes it so valuable for risk management. Ready to get started? View pricing or get a free 30-day trial.
