Threats and Opportunities

Risks can be threats, opportunities or both. Threats and opportunities are defined for risk assignment depending on results of the risk outcome. Negative risk outcomes mean opportunities.

Example 1: Threat

• Risk: Change Requirements
• Outcome: Fixed Delay
• Result: 2 days

Example 2: This is an opportunity: a negative number indicates that this is an acceleration rather than a delay of the technology introduction

• Risk: Change of technology
• Outcome: Delay in technology introduction
• Result: -10% Low

Example 3: This is both a threat and an opportunity depending upon the supplier.

• Risk: Chance of supplier
• Outcome: fixed cost increase
• Result for mutually exclusive alternative 1: $30,000
• Result for mutually exclusive alternative 2: -$20,000
  

You can have different sets of labels for threats and opportunities for a risk category. For example, for the risk category Schedule, a threat outcome type can be “Critical > 1 year delay”, for an opportunity it can be “Critical > 1 year acceleration”. If you want to enter opportunities, you need to enter a negative percentage (e.g. -25%) as the outcome type.

See also

Risks in RiskyProject
Risk Matrix