Reflection on “Don’t Leave Home Without It, By Alderton, November 2012”

The article “Don’t Leave Home Without It” discusses the risk managements from a technical perspective, and it suggests that anything that can’t be measured, it can’t be managed, and what can’t be defined, can’t be measured, and that works as well on risk, risk severity, and risk probability.

This article discussed the risk register. A risk register can be defined as a document that contains the results of all risk management processes and is usually displayed in a table format, so it has to document all potential risk events and their related information, such as the description of the risk event, the rank for each risk event (for example, high, medium, or low), the potential responses to each risk event, the probability of the risk event occurring, etc. In other words, it helps to do a formal assessment for risk, which increases the probability of successfully completing the project.

The article also discussed the Zurich insurance company project where the company launched a global risk engineering workstation project, in that project; teams answered more than 250 questions in main 12 areas. Based on the answers collected they knew how to address the risks, including mitigating, accepting, avoiding or exploiting. The questionnaire produced a solid summary of the risk for each of the relevant areas.

Some of the lessons that I learn from this article is there are helpful procedures that can be considered in constructing an effective risk register such as starting early thinking about risk management, engaging diverse stakeholders in risk planning, re-evaluating the process of risk assessment and consider as a continuous process.

Personally, I thought that I have never done any professional risk register, but this article made me think of my job in a different way.

Risk management is not only done by the project managers of the project, it can be done by team members on lower levels. I work with a company that called AIC, and my position was a design group leader. I have never been part of the real risk team to study the probability of the going over budget, or not meeting the deadlines of a project, and how to avoid such things; however, my job as a designer considered many risk assessment; as a designer, my job is to come up with the safest design with the lowest cost; and part of the design philosophy, we need to take into consideration all types of loads that a building may experience in its life time. Each building has to be designed based on several load cases, taking the combination of many of the severe weather conditions. For example, there is a risk that this building will face a tornado, earthquake, flooding, etc. How to consider the severity of these natural disasters into account, and based on what loads I need to design my building according to, all that in my opinion is part of risk identification and risk management. I may not produce a risk register, but I submit a document that is called a design methodology, and it contains similar data to what a register would have.