Project Risk Register Template

Toolkits
Toolkits January 15, 2022

Project Risk Register Template

This project risk register template enables you to record the potential risks faced by your project and to assign a likelihood of them occurring and a level of severity in terms of impact.

Documentation is often a significant part of a projects success and our free templates are designed to help you with this part of the project. Keeping a complete and accurate record of all the ‘risks’ your project faces, both real, potential and probably can be achieved through your project risk register.

This template is more than just a list of potential risks that can be identified by a unique identification number. It provides a record of a calculated likelihood of the risk occurring and assigns a level of severity to each Id, which relates to the type of impact it would have on the projects continuation and ultimate completion.

In instances where you are managing a complex or business critical project you may also want to include an additional layer of assessment in your risk register. You may need to record and grade each risk in terms of how difficult it is to actually detect. It may be important for you to also record and have documented in your risk register an overall ranking of each risk. This will enable you to focus on those risks that have a critical and serious impact on your project.

Project Risk Register Template
You may even choose to have specific project reports tailored to assist in recognizing the warning signs of these risks. These project reports could also include risks that are extremely tricky to detect and can be tailored to spot the details and factors identified as part of the risk management process. These types of specialized reports can be for the duration of your project or they can be linked to a particular phase or work package, as dictated by the nature of your project.

Our free project risk register template allows you to record a unique Id and description for each risk. You will then detail the likely cause of this risk occurring and describe which project phase or work package would be affected if this risk came about. Then you would describe what that affect would be on your project.

For each risk you would calculate the probability of it happening and this would then be reflected in the level of severity you allocated to this risk. Whether you felt it was a high, moderate or low level of seriousness in relation to your project’s success. The level of probability you were able to calculate would be influenced by the ease with which you could detect when a certain risk would likely to happen. If the nature of your project forms a critical part of your organization’s strategic growth you will want to record this aspect of detectability and grade it from easy to moderate to complex.

For many project mangers the final aspect they want recorded within their risk register is an overall ranking, such as critical, serious, modest or trivial attached to each risk. This ranking then enables you to allocate the resources and time you spend monitoring and managing risks appropriately. As with all our free templates you are able to alter and amend it to suit the particular nature of your project.