A Month In The Life Of A Risk Analyst

Time flies is a very common and overused cliché often cited by people when they struggle to give an account of what they have been up to. What makes the month I have spent in my new role fascinating is not that it has passed so quickly, but that it seems to have been at least three months. This is because so much has been achieved, so much insight gained, and so much is planned ahead. It is a kind or role where if you didn't have a watch, you would probably forget it's time to go home. Many people seem to arrive work very early in the morning and stay much later in the evening.

Joining a department at a time of transformation can be very exciting but having to lead on this transformation is where the challenges come. Knowing that what you are doing is unique, and that you have been brought in to provide answers and solutions, not ask question, is exhilarating. It also underscores the level of responsibility, innovativeness and independence required.


Oracle Primavera P6 has become the industry standard for project scheduling and management. It is a robust tool that can be used for multi million dollar projects with thousands of activities. However, the risk module that is part of the enterprise version does not seem to be that ubiquitous as much as I can see. This is primarily a risk register used for qualitative risk management and should not be confused with the Primavera Risk Analysis used for quantitative risk management. The humble excel spreadsheet still seem to be the preferred tool for qualitative risk management due to its ease of use and ubiquity. However, there are many shortcomings with excel especially for large organisations with lots of projects where centralised transparency, aggregation, and escalation of risks is required. This is precisely where P6 can help. In addition to providing a centralised database, it has the added advantage of being able to link risks and their responses to activities in the project schedule and a lot of other useful features.

So my first task has been to get P6 to do exactly what I want it to and what it has been bought for. Despite being fairly intuitive, P6 doesn't give in so easily. It has it's own way of doing things which it doesn't readily reveal until you have experimented a fair bit. The manual is useful, but does not seem to make much sense until you start seeking answers to specific issues, puzzles and mysteries. Googling doesn't help much, and discussion forums seem to focus on other aspects of Primavera or quantitative risk management. The few posts about the risk module in forums did not get any useful response or any response at all.

P6 Risk Module Forum:No helpful responses

 All these made cracking the various jigsaw puzzles really exciting, and there have been so many eureka moments. Sometimes I spend so much time trying to demystify a feature and then often stop to wonder if there is any solution at all. For example, it is puzzling to discover that P6 would let you filter your risks all sorts of trivialities like risk cause and description but not on risk scores and risk exposures! It is incomprehensible to realise that it would not let you wrap texts for longer descriptions if you wanted to produce printable reports. It is frustrating that you have to go to the EPS tab of Primavera to see the project risk exposure and that it does not sum the opportunity risks or the total response plans cost anywhere!. You wonder why it would not display these essential data on the risk page so that you can easily produce a comprehensive report.

Despite all the frustrations, you can't help marvelling at the things it can actually do: you can manage the risks of an unlimited number of multiple projects together; You can easily clone an existing risk into another project; You can group the risks in all sorts of ways for emphasis and ease of analysis; You can link risks to schedule activities to automatically generate their proximity; you can link response actions to activities in the schedule and their attributes will automatically be updated as planners monitor them; you can aggregate the risks exposures of projects at various organisational level up to the corporate level.

At first it was really heartbreaking to realise that it won't even let you assign risk probability and cost impact at will, but forces you to create and use probability and impact ranges. Apart from the differences in terminology, this is precisely  where transitioning from excel logs becomes tricky. The risk attributes in excel have to be "translated" into their equivalents in the P6 set up. These limitations are upsetting only in the beginning until you understand the rigorousness of the probability impact matrix (PIM). While the basic 5x5 matrix would give scores by just multiplying the horizontal axis with vertical axis, the matrix in use meticulously factors in the sizes of the ranges in order to generate the scored. Understand exactly how it does it was nerve-racking but it was cracked! Choosing the sizes of the ranges that would suit all projects poses its own challenges but it is a balancing act.

It has really been a fulfilling month. The next stage, as one of my colleagues advised, will involve not so much of my technical skills but social ones. Lots of meetings will have to he held to roll out the new methodology and get the buy-in. Lots of project managers will have to be contacted; lots of names and faces will have to be remembered, and I expect that a lot of tea will have to be drunk.