Risk management
Our services
Our appraisals and audits quantify current and future project risks and provide support and guidelines on how to resolve them. All projects carry some form of risk which must be identified early and mitigated. A risk register must be actively maintained to quantify the risk, its likelihood and impact on the project, and a mitigation strategy should be in place to manage it effectively. Some of the key risks covered in our appraisals include:
- Technical risk: This is the risk that the technical approach used by the organisation may be poorly specified, infeasible, not of global standards, or lacking in available resources to carry it out.
- Financial risk: This is the risk that the organisation will not be able to finance the project to its conclusion, may cut short its supply of funds and resources, or may not have budgeted for project extensions and extra need for resources.
- Operational risk: This is the risk that for any financial, technical, human resource, or management reason, the project cannot be successfully carried out to expectations within given deadlines.
- Strategic risk: This is the risk that an organization’s strategic objectives will not be achieved. The project outcomes must be competitive, commercially viable and sustainable.
- Compliance risk: This is the risk that project outputs will not comply to required standards and the products and services may not be competitive once they comply.
- Freedom to operate risk: This is the risk that a thorough search of patents, registered trademarks and copyrighted material may not be carried out in all territories where products and services are to be commercialised. As a result of this, companies risk litigation and higher barriers for exploitation.
Regular appraisals and project audits at set milestones help identify current risks, evaluate how well the project management team has mitigated old risks, and improve mitigation for upcoming risks.
Our approach
We look at risk in a holistic manner placing the strategic goals of the organisation at the heart of risk management. Our focus is on managing technology development project risk as opposed to company’s financial risk based around sales and returns as a part of day to day activities. In case of start-ups, the entire company operations may be based around a single project, whereas more mature companies may be engaged with a portfolio of projects to develop new products and services. We look at risk with an end-to-end approach and estimate risk value and impact in discussions with the host organisation. If the project is externally funded, the fund provider’s role is critical. They need to understand whether project risks can be managed or not, and how it impacts on delivery scales and whether additional financial resources will be needed. Our feedback on risk review includes a scoresheet on various risk indicators with feedback on how these should be mitigated in cases where the internal approaches are not sufficient. Our approach and suggested way of working is regular lightweight project appraisals to that issues can be detected in good time, followed by a formal audit at critical milestones.
Issues you may be facing
Project risks are often discovered by project owners, funders and audits at a late stage by which time significant time and resources have been lost. You may become aware of project risks in some of the following cases:
- Project team misses key deliverables on time as required
- Projects require additional resources and you are not convinced why
- Project managers highlight upcoming challenges on human and material resources
- You have seen competing products or other developments that may pose challenges to your project output
- Project team seems unaware of compliance issues
- Working prototypes are delayed
- Results on prototypes do not meet expectations
- The project team is unsure if the product has global potential
- Key members of project team have left or are leaving
- There has been no external expert appraisal of the project as yet