Risk Management

Every business has risks with what they do, or don't do, and similarly there are risks with your customers and suppliers. These need to be identified and, more importantly, something needs to be done about them so that they don't turn into issues.

An assumption is no different. Suppose a flu virus causes half of your staff to fall ill. It may be unlikely but if it happened could you cope? What are the financial consequences? Or perhaps you've just assumed that it won't happen - is that an acceptable assumption? What actions could you take in advance to protect your staff and your business? Are there procedures that should be in place if it did happen? More importantly, is anyone actually doing anything about it?

Silver-Owl provides the framework within which you can record and track these potential problems and see what is being done about them. If you take action, the chances are that you will save a lot of wasted time and money clearing up the mess when you can least afford to!

Project Level

Risks are typically logged by a Project Team Member at Project level.

They may also be entered above Project level if they apply to multiple projects, or be linked to a Department, a specific external company or be applied company wide.

Each is defined with a description, what the implications are if it occurs, how likely that is, and how dramatic it would be.

Actions that can be taken to prevent it are entered, assigned to specific people and tracked.

Depending on what is entered and how far actions are progressed an urgency factor is calculated to tell the Programme (or Project) Manager where to concentrate his/her efforts.

A powerful index lets you filter those that you see in many ways, e.g. based upon the scope, who raised it, who “owns” it, etc.

The index can automatically include problems at a higher level that affect a project and vice-versa. This removes the need for every project to record the same risk.

Business Level

A Senior Manager may tag specific risks for special attention.