Managing Risks

WSS integration with Project Server affords an excellent tool for identifying, tracking, and mitigating threats to project success, that is, for risk management. As the term is used in Project Server, a risk is a record of a potential threat (or less likely, an opportunity) that could affect the completion of a task or project. The Risks functionality in Project Server allows an organization to identify, rank, and track the risks they are most interested in. You can also associate risks with issues, documents, or other risks.

Risks and issues (another feature enabled in Project Server by WSS and described in the next section) have some similarities. However, one distinguishing aspect of a risk is the trigger. A trigger is the criteria or threshold that needs to be met before a risk’s contingency plan goes into effect. In a large organization, different people may be involved in defining or quantifying risks, developing contingency plans, and specifying a risk’s trigger. Should a risk materialize into an actionable item, it may become an issue for ongoing tracking and mitigation. You can enable e-mail notification and alerts to keep track of risk status and thereby see the status of all risks associated with a project or all risks within an organization.

In this section, we’ll see how to create a new risk (that is, formally identify something as a risk) for a project.

1. Jo Brown, an executive at A.Datum Corporation, logs in to Project Server and navigates to the Project Center.

2. There, she selects the 100X DVD Drive project and goes to the Risk Center for that project.

Jo wants to create a new risk for the 100X DVD Drive project. Currently, this project has no risks associated with it.

3. Jo clicks New Item on the New menu and displays the Risks: New Item page.

4. Jo enters the risk information and assigns the risk to the project manager of the 100X DVD Drive project, Steve Masters.

5. Jo clicks OK to record the risk and returns to the Risks page for this project. The new risk appears there.

Steve can now review the details of the risk item, change its Status value and other details, or assign the risk to someone else. Jo can keep track of any changes to the risk item by pointing to the risk title and clicking Alert Me in the menu that appears.