[Best Practices] How Do You Track Risks? ⚡️

Hi there! 🙌

If you manage work, you probably have to deal with project risks. A risk is something that could happen during the execution of a project and would have a negative impact on the outcome. This could be anything from not being able to achieve the outcome, to a cost being higher than expected. 

We wanted to take a closer look at how Wrike can help you track and manage project risk. 

Let’s dive into each of these features in more detail 👇

1. Project Progress 

Wrike automatically calculates your project progress based on selected metrics and updates it in real-time. The available metrics are:

• Progress by number of completed tasks - calculated by dividing the number of completed tasks by the total number of tasks - the result is multiplied by 100%.
• Progress based on the duration of completed tasks - calculated by dividing the duration of completed tasks by the total duration of tasks in the project - the result is multiplied by 100%.
• Total progress - all active (enabled) metrics are added up, and the result is divided by the number of active metrics.

You can track project progress in the project info panel, the Table view, the project dashboard widget, and project-based reports and on the timeline portion of the Gantt chart.

2. AI Project Risk Prediction

AI Project Risk Prediction monitors your projects for any risks that may cause you to miss your deadlines, then assigns a risk level (low, medium, or high). 

AI estimations will replace the previous version of ​Project Health​​ calculations (color-coding) that we’ve discussed above. You can find these estimations in the Project Progress window in the project info panel, Table view, the project dashboard widget, and project-based reports.

Project risk assessment takes into account a number of factors including: 

• Project complexity (the number of tasks, subtasks, subfolders, and subprojects, and how they are structured)
• The number of completed and overdue tasks
• The number of assignees
• Task activity
• The owner’s previous projects (if they were not completed on time this may increase the predicted risk)

Understand your Project Risk

You'll only get project risk estimates for:

• Projects you own or projects of account owners, who also enabled this feature.
• Active projects which include criteria that allow for risk calculation such as duration, start date, end date, etc. (subprojects and tasks do not need to have start and end dates).
• Projects with Project Progress activated.

The more accurate and up-to-date the details of your projects are (start and end dates, status, project's tasks info, etc), the more accurate the risk predictions will be. The project risk is calculated each time you make changes to your projects or tasks included in your projects and is visible after a couple of seconds.

Projects which don't meet these criteria are labeled "Not assessed" and are marked in grey.

Your Project Risk Prediction consists of a level (low, medium, or high) and a corresponding colour which can be seen in your Project Health window:

• Low risk - Green
• Medium risk - Amber
• High risk - Red

Please note that AI Project risk prediction is currently available in Wrike Labs and it’s considered an experimental feature.

3. Project Risk Report 

Project Risk Report is a feature based on the company’s proprietary machine learning technology. Once you enable Project Risk Report, Wrike AI will analyze all active projects that you are the owner of and predict how likely each project is to be completed on time. Project risk assessment takes into account numerous factors including project complexity, the number of completed and overdue tasks, the number of assignees, task activity, the history of the owner’s previous projects, and many others.

You’ll receive a weekly Project Risk Report email with the risk assessments based on the results of Wrike’s automated prediction. If a project is at risk of not meeting the deadline, it’ll be highlighted in the email. For projects with high and medium risk levels, the machine learning model also provides the list of factors that contribute to potential issues so you can proactively address them. For projects with high-risk levels, each factor will also contain a list of contributing tasks.

4. AI Recommended Tasks - Available on the New Wrike Experience

AI Recommended tasks help you make sure you’re working on the tasks that require the most attention first. It adds a widget to the top of your Home page displaying up to 8 active recommended tasks which are assigned to you.

Our Machine learning model looks at tasks assigned to you and assesses their urgency based on factors such as:

• Due date
• Task status
• Prioritization
• How often you've edited or commented on them

There are other ways to track and report on project risk, for example, using tagging or custom fields to designate high, medium, or low risk projects. How are you tracking project risk? Let’s discuss below! 👇

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover