Project Risk Register Template – The Benefits of a Standardised Approach

Your Project Risk Register Template is the tabular structure that provides a home for every element of your risk management process. Clever application of a standardized Project Risk Register template helps you manage complexity and prevent failures, so that your projects are less risky, and more flexible and efficient. Let’s look at the seven Cs that describe the benefits your Project Risk Register delivers.

1. Consistency. You achieve consistency when you conform to a logically ordered and integrated standard. A Risk Register Template provides a quick and easy framework that is simple to complete and ensures you include all the elements necessary to assess, treat and manage risk. This allows you to achieve a consistently high level of quality, time and again.
2. Compactness. A tabular layout makes it easy to see all the issues at a glance. Distilling a large amount of complex information into a compact format allows you to break down key information so that you can deliver it to your audience in easily digestible chunks. Don’t think that your team and stakeholders will painstakingly search through lengthy written documents to find the information they need, because they won’t. Providing them with a compact alternative encourages knowledge sharing and risk awareness.
3. Concision. Like the Project Charter, concision is king. That’s why this article is no more than 600 words, while still making all the important points. Think of your Risk Register Template in the same way – it is a tool that forces you to be concise. It includes exactly what needs to be included – no more and no less. You save time and energy.
4. Commitment. Risk Management isn’t the job of just the project manager. Using a structured template allows you to identify actions to treat risk and to assign those actions to risk owners. By doing this, you get commitment from your wider team and stakeholders to own and manage risk. This also increases awareness of the overall project risks and how everyone has a contribution to make.
5. Completeness. In your Risk Register Template there is a place for everything. Nothing in the risk management process is ignored, inadvertently or otherwise. This maximizes your ability to holistically manage project risks.
6. Control. When risks are listed consistently, coherently and completely, with commitment to action plans, then and only then can you track and control them. This allows you to control the quality of your risk management process. You and your team can refer to the Register as a touchstone for checking and monitoring progress towards achieving your agreed risk management outcomes.
7. Communication. Clarity of communications is at the core of any successful management endeavor. The outcome of all the above benefits is that the Project Risk Register allows you to communicate clearly with your project team and stakeholders about project risks and how they will be managed, monitored and controlled. Nothing is left to chance.

Often a standardized approach, such as a template, is viewed as an inflexible one size fits all solution that stifles innovation. In this case the reverse is true. Using a Project Risk Register Template helps you improve how you manage project risks, and lets you do it consistently, concisely and thoroughly. By using a Project Risk Register Template instead of reverting to a random process, you quickly generate a systematic and ordered method for capturing and managing risks that creates time and capacity for innovation.