Look for sober and honest Risk Analysis in your technology solutions provider.

Poor planning and evaluation are top reasons why internet or web enabled software initiatives fail to perform. At dataSpheric, we're project management intensive because we know what it takes to assemble all the pieces, to make sure no risk or threat is unaccounted for, to leverage the wealth of knowledge from your people from experience.

Our process has been battle-tested on enterprise scale web development as well as small business and not-for-profit initiatives. This simplified Risk Analysis tool tracks critical threats to success and their resolution. For more complex projects we use a numerical scoring system to evaluate the results but for most situations this tool will do what you need it to do. There's no special magic at work here, it's more of an intellectual exercise, but the key is follow-through on each and every risk. Use this tool for your business planning and review it regularly.

dataSpheric Project Risk Analysis Worksheet

Each threat or risk is tracked separately. What you need to do is make a list of threats to project success in the first column. The trick here is to imagine all possibilities. When I say all possibilities I encourage you to think of the unlikely but not the fantastic. Flooding is a possibility, however unlikely. For our purposes, men from Mars are not. But if you are an essential optimist, you may not be the best person to lead the discussion. A certain view of reality is required to produce maximum value from this tool. The cynic or devil's advocate on your staff is a welcome participant in this exercise.

Now, using the rating and probability tables, you'll assign values for the impact of the risk on your organization and the probability of it's occurrence. Fill in values for each risk on your worksheet. At this point you should be making some intuitive observations. Risks that carry low threat and are impossible get crossed right out. Risks that carry a high threat level and high probability ratings are the ones to focus the most resources on.

Because numerous people can be aware of different risks to a project, especially when the team gets large, risk analysis is always best done in a workshop environment but it can also take place on a virtual team format, it just takes longer.

The final output is entered into a spreadsheet. Our dataSpheric project manager then meets with top stakeholders to determine how best to proceed. In theory, we want to determine the "threshold" risk/probability level at which we must act, assign each risk to persons who will develop specific countermeasures or contingencies to remedy or ameliorate the risk impact and to track these to resolution. In the real world of Phoenix web development, this is often impacted by time and cost considerations.