The Process of Project Risk Identification

Project risk management has become an important area of interest in project management practice over the past decade. Numerous best practice standards, tools and techniques have been developed focussing on a more effective risk management process. This process consists of four main phases: identification, analysis, response and mitigation. It is widely held that both the identification and analysis phases of the risk management process are the most important ones as they can have the biggest impact on the accuracy of the risk assessment exercise. While the analysis process, with its range of sophisticated tools and techniques, is well developed, we argue that such analysis is completely dependent on possible risk events being accurately identified in the first instance. However, compared with the analysis phase, the process of risk identification is poorly understood and the tools and techniques are much less developed....