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Practical risk analysis template for de-risking projects
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Practical risk analysis template for de-risking projects

Conduct a qualitative and quantitative risk analysis for your company or project with this risk analysis template.
Laila Robinson
This template was built with Coda, the all-in-one doc that brings words, data, and teams together. Play with the template below or copy the doc to save your edits.

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Risk Category
Risk
Likelihood
Rating
Cost Impact ($)
External
Required permits don’t get approved
3 - Likely
1 - Low
$1,000,000
Bank rejects land loan
4 - Most Likely
3 - High
$500,000
Organizational
Treasury secretary doesn’t approve new funding
2 - Unlikely
4 - Very High
$800,000
Sacker doesn’t agree to place pin on Connerty’s coat
1 - Most Unlikely
3 - High
$0
Technical
Wiretap in home doesn’t pick up audio
1 - Most Unlikely
4 - Very High
$10,000
Project Management
Judge DiGiulio doesn’t arrive on time to candy store
2 - Unlikely
2 - Moderate
$5,000
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It is not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them. Ed Catmull, president of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation
Risk is an unavoidable part of business. It comes up in nearly everything we do, from hiring new staff to taking on projects that are outside our comfort zone.
But risk, as most of you know it, has a lot of bad connotations. People hear the word and they assume the worst. Because of this, there can be hesitation around taking risks, especially in the business world. Projects might fail. New hires might not stay. New features might not be what customers are looking for.
Without risk, though, though, you can’t succeed. It’s why, rather than avoid risk altogether, businesses use strategies (and templates) that help them understand whether a risk is one that’s worth it, or whether it’s going to burn the whole business down in the process.
That’s where a risk analysis template comes into play.

What is risk analysis?

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Risk analysis
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is the process of examining the various potential risks that might come up over the course of a project and is a part of risk management as a whole in business. It allows you to both qualify and quantify potential project risk to see how they might affect the final product. Risk analysis doesn’t remove risk from projects, but it gives you a way to use preemptive mitigation for potential problems or put systems in place to deal with risks that you may encounter. The goal is to make smarter decisions around the risks involved with any given decision (or project) because you’ve carefully considered as many possibilities
as possible.

Two types of risk analysis

Ultimately, risk analysis allows you to create better risk response and risk management plans.
In project management, there are two ways that risk tends to be analyzed, qualitative and quantitative. Let’s see how these two methods of analyzing risks differ from each other.

Qualitative risk analysis

Qualitative risk analysis is looking at how likely something is to happen based on factors such as whether they’re likely to actually happen and impact (along with other relevant factors that may exist within your company). Qualitative analysis allows you to decide which risks are worth focusing on and which ones you can reasonably ignore. You run a qualitative risk analysis to help you save time and energy by not focusing on every possible risk (because there are going to be some that just aren’t worth looking at). Instead, you look at the ones with the biggest negative impact on a project and those that are highly likely to actually occur.

Quantitative risk analysis

With quantitative risk analysis, you’re looking at the risks identified as noteworthy in the qualitative risk analysis phase, digging deeper into the potential impact of the risk, and assigning a numerical value based on that impact.
Essentially, to determine risk severity, you’re assessing factors like the impact on cost, schedule, and outcome to determine how much any given risk might affect the project. The higher the number, the greater the risk. A risk assessment
matrix template
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can help with this stage.

What is the purpose of risk analysis templates?

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Risk assessment templates
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give you a way to systematically analyze risks that you may encounter in a project. With the right customization of risk analysis templates, they can be used to help with the specific types of risks that apply to your business and allow you to focus on creating better processes and working smarter within your organization.

Project planning

The more you think about what could happen before you start a project, the easier planning becomes. To some, it might seem like you’re looking too hard at all the negative things that might happen. But risk isn’t always a bad thing. It’s just something that could happen that might impact the desired outcome.
With a thorough risk analysis, you’re giving yourself a way to prepare for all the things that might happen, good or bad. It helps you to create a detailed project plan that will allow you to be proactive about dealing with risks as they come up, rather than scrambling to fix something after the fact. That way, if something does go wrong, the risk analysis template will make you look way more professional when you deal with the problem because you’ve already put a plan in place.

Improving business safety

You can’t avoid risk in your business, but you can put better systems in place to manage it. Risk analysis gives you a way to put risk control in place before you even start. With a risk analysis template, when something happens during a project, even if it’s a high-risk situation, you’ll be able to handle it in a way that reduces the overall potential impact of risks.
When risk mitigation becomes a regular part of your projects, you don’t reduce the level of risk, but you become more adept at managing it. The better you get at managing risk, the more secure your business will be, even when things go wrong.

Preparing for possible future hazards

The more time you spend thinking about risk in your business and the projects that you run within your business, the better prepared you’ll be for, well, everything. Even if you discover a kind of risk that you’ve never seen before, when you have plans and templates in place to help you figure out the best possible way to manage these new issues as they arise.

👉 Get started with this free risk analysis template
Copy this template
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After you copy this template, you can start utilizing this free risk analysis template for your projects and your business.

How to use risk analysis template by Coda

Step 1: Set up risk properties

Before you start listing all the risks associated with a project, there are a few risk properties you need to define. These are all in the
Admin
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page. For instance, the
Risk Categories
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includes things like
@External
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and
@Project Management
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, but your company may have different risk categories. There are also
Likelihood Scores
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and
Rating Scores
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to define. We put some default values in these lists, but you should customize this based on the needs of your company.
Getting these properties listed out correctly is important since they are referenced in the main Risks table which we’ll discuss in the next step.

Step 2: Add risks and evaluate impact

The main part of this template is the
Risk analysis template
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page. On this page, you can add new risks to the
Risks List
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. For each risk you identify, you can add info related to this risk like the risk’s Context, Risk Category, and the Owner/DRI. You’ll notice that some of the dropdowns in this table are populated by the properties you set up in the previous step (see the
Admin
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page). Once you have all the risks for your project entered in, it’s time to do the actual risk analysis in the next step.

Step 3: View your project’s risks in different ways

In the
Grouped by Likelihood/Rating
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,
Grouped by Risk Category
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, and
Cost impact
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pages, you’ll see the same list of risks you created from step 2. However, the list of risks in these pages are views of the main table. This means that whatever you add or edit in the main
Risk analysis template
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will get reflected in these pages.
The purpose for these different views is to analyze your project’s risks across multiple dimensions. If you only want to see the top-ranked risks in terms of the dollar impact, you would look at the
Cost impact
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page. To see the “most likely” and “highest rated” risks, you would consult the
Grouped by Likelihood/Rating
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page to see which risks should take most of your attention.

Risk analysis template FAQs

What is the difference between risk analysis & risk assessment?

Risk analysis and risk assessment are similar, but different aspects of project management. With risk assessment, you’re looking at the big picture. What might happen, how might a project be affected if it does, and how are we going to deal with it? It’s pretty high level.
With risk analysis, you’re going deeper into each risk and looking at what the likelihood of each risk happening is, what the impact on the project (or business might be), and how you can avoid it. You’re taking a more analytical approach, factoring in both qualitative and quantitative analysis when looking at risks (as we discussed above).

How do you write a risk analysis?

The best way to write a risk analysis is to follow a template that walks you through the five main steps in a way that makes the outcome clear. Templates help because they remove the guesswork from the process. You’re not struggling to remember anything that might be critical because everything is laid out with a clear path in a logical order.
Ideally, you’re following a five-step process that helps you identify and manage risk.

What are the five main steps in risk analysis?

The five steps of risk analysis are:
Identify the risks. Start by figuring out what the possible risks are for any given project. You may have a list of identified risks already put together from past projects, which helps, but you should always try to look at each project with fresh eyes to avoid missing anything.
Analyze the risk. Do both a qualitative and quantitative analysis on the risks you’ve identified to help you rank them by likelihood and severity. This allows you to know what risks you should be focusing on during the planning stages and helps you come up with possible solutions.
Explore solutions. In this stage, it helps to have more than one solution for each possible risk. It may feel redundant, but having a backup plan to handle different variables could be the thing that saves your butt if something happens. Talking to various stakeholders about how they solve these project risks can help a lot in this stage.
Pick a solution. Choose one of the solutions you came up with in the previous stage for each of the risks that you identified and analyzed. You don’t have to stick with this mitigation plan, but have an action plan ready to go, just in case.
Document and review. As always, take the time to document any risks that come up during a project, how you dealt with them, and whether or not you had an effective solution in place. When you’re done, review everything to see where you could improve for next time. There isn’t always going to be room for improvement, but even smaller improvements to how you deal with risk add up over time.

What are the risk rating categories?

We talked about ranking the risks when doing quantitative analysis using a numeric system. This system is usually attached to risk rating categories that define risk probability, that is, how much of a risk something is. The four risk rating categories are:
Most unlikely
Unlikely
Likely
Most likely
You attach a number to each of these to help further define how likely risk is to occur over the course of a project. This helps you understand at a glance whether a business risk is going to happen or not.

What are the main risk categories?

There are a lot of ways that you can categorize risk, but we’ve found that they tend to fall under one of the following categories:
Technical risks. Will the equipment you’re using break down during a project. This could be anything from software glitching to servers crashing. These tend to be the most unpredictable because, unless there are clear warning signs that something isn’t working well, you likely won’t know until it happens.
External risks. These are things like your supply chain, contractors, natural disasters (like hurricanes or forest fires), anything that you rely on for projects, but are outside of your control.
Organizational risks. Here we have the business risk that exists inside your company. This includes budget, staffing, leadership, and all the other things that exist within your business that can impact the success of a project.
Project management risks. Finally there’s project management. How well prepared for the project are you, as a project manager? Do you have plans, the staff you need, the resources you need, have you come up with a clear timeline? Any one of these areas has the potential for risk that can have a negative impact on your project.
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Risk analysis template
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