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The basics of risk management
I want to congratulate David Hillson (a.k.a. the Risk Doctor) for his video explaining his view of risk management basics.
In Risk management basics: What exactly is it?, he takes less than five minutes to sum up risk management with six questions:
- What am I trying to achieve?
- What might affect me? Are there things out there in the future that might help or hinder me?
- Which of those things that might affect me are the most important?
- What should I do about it?
- Did it work?
- What changed?
He says that “managing risk is one of the most natural things we can do and one of the most important”. I have to agree, although I don’t think we do it as well as we should.
I like his six questions.
David has written 11 books on risk management, which is more than me, and I have to admit that I have not read them. While I suspect that we will not agree on every topic, such as the value of risk appetite statements, his six basic questions are similar to my set.
This is what I have included in the book I am writing now, on making business sense of technology risk.
I like to explain risk management as something every effective manager does:
- They understand where they are today and where they need to go (their objectives).
- They…