About Risks

A risk identifies a potential problem that may prevent the completion of a task or project. Program Central captures risk details and tracks the mitigation process.

Risks can be created for projects and project concepts and WBS tasks within them. Risks cannot be created for project templates.

The risk owner and assignees, project owner, and Project Leads can attach documents and project content to a risk. The steps for working with risk attachments are the same as the steps for attachments to any item.

Related Topics
About Projects

About Exporting Risks

You can use the tool to export the list of risks on any Risks page, including a list of your assigned risks, the list of a project's risks, or the list of a tasks risks. The list of risks is exported to a comma delimited text file (.csv). You can save the file to disk or open it directly in the application configured on your system for handling csv files.

The export for risks exports only the information displayed on the Risks table pages. This does not include all attributes of a risk, such as the abatement plan, impact value, or probability value. Because it doesn't include all risk attributes, the exported information cannot be used when importing risks back into the system. For a description of the format and information needed for a risk import file, see About Importing Risks.

About Importing Risks

The project owner and people assigned Project Lead access to the project can create risks for a project or WBS task by importing risk information from a comma separated text file (.csv). The imported information includes all risk attributes and RPNs (Risk Priority Numbers) and attributes

By default, the import includes the following fields for risks and RPNs. Your system may be set up to access more or fewer fields and in a different order. For instructions on modifying the information imported, see the Administrator's Guide.

Object

Fields

Risk

Type, Name, Title, Description, Risk Visibility, Estimated Start Date, Estimated End Date, Actual Start Date, Actual End Date, Risk Type, Measure of Success, Abatement Plan

RPN

Type, Name, Risk Impact, Risk Probability, Risk RPN Value, Effective Date, Status

Follow these guidelines when creating the import file for risks:


  • The file must be saved as a csv file, which is an ASCII text file with fields separated by commas.
  • Multiple risks and multiple RPNs for each risk can be imported in one file.
  • There must an entry for each risk and RPN field accepted by the import and the fields must be in the order defined by the system administrator. The default fields and field order are listed in the above table. If a risk doesn't have a value for a particular field, the file should just have two commas.
  • The first field is always the type of the object to import.
  • All dates must be in the format DD-Mon-YY, for example, 09-Sep-02.

Here is an example of an import file with fields for one risk and 6 RPNs.

Risk,Risk1572,Risk1572 Title,Risk 1572 
Description,Public,13-Sep-02,15-Sep-02,,,Quality,The measure of 
success,Abatement plan

RPN,RPN1572a,5,5,25,13-Sep-02,"The status of the rpn, it has not 
started yet.",,,,,

RPN,RPN1572b,4,4,16,13-Sep-02,Started working on it.,,,,,

RPN,RPN1572c,3,3,9,13-Sep-02,Half way there,,,,,

RPN,RPN1572d,2,2,4,13-Sep-02,Mostly there,,,,,

RPN,RPN1572e,3,1,1,13-Sep-02,Trivial matter now,,,,,

RPN,RPN1572f,1,1,1,13-Sep-02,Done,,,,,