Let's discuss risk management! ✅

Love this topic!

At our company, leveraging Wrike has greatly enhanced our risk management process. Each team member benefits from a personalized dashboard that displays their current tasks, along with due and overdue dates, ensuring deadlines are always in focus. Our program managers play a crucial role in tracking and addressing blocked tasks within Agile pods. Thanks to Wrike's automation capabilities, they receive instant notifications of any issues, allowing for swift resolution.

Having a regular governance process with subject matter experts determining actual risk and timing vs initial submissions and estimations can help to mitigate risk. Unbiased sorting based on time, LOE, ROI, and overall vision for the organization can arrange projects in a specific order similar to aircraft control at the airport. Then with set dates that must be met, clear communication with progress updates within the tool, and custom fields that clearly define quick glance needs, risk can be mitigated. A global dashboard showing status and deadlines along with clear communication kept within the one tool so everyone can view the progress, data, presentations, etc from one source of truth (all baked into Wrike) makes preventing risk a higher likelihood of success.

We categorise our work in the Kanban board columns, and flag missing information or cancelled jobs this way. We don't enter a risk stage in our line of work, but we can be overworked with too many briefs. Wrike itself is our risk management tool, so we can easily assign jobs to people whose workflow can fit it in, reducing the risk of one person having too much work on while another person has too little. And we can do this in several ways in Wrike, which allows different people to have their own unique way of working!

Re https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/30294984428183/comments/30487088908695 (Amber),

Hi Amber,

I'm not sure what the +D is on the template you're using, but if are using projects to manage the work for mitigating risks, the way we tie the timescales together for risks and projects, by adding the risk to the location of the project, and then rolling dates up from the project to the risk. 

Hi everyone!

Here how our team leverages Wrike to proactively monitor project health and mitigate potential budget overruns.

We rely heavily on dashboards to keep a close eye on two critical metrics:

• Project Progress: We track the progress of each project to ensure we're on schedule.
• Time Budget Utilization: For each project, we set a budget of planned hours and use timelogs to monitor actual time spent in real-time. A percentage bar on our dashboards visualizes budget consumption.

To prevent surprises and empower project owners, we've set up automated notifications. When a project reaches 50%, 75%, and 90% of its allocated budget, the project owner receives an automatic alert. This allows them to:

• Stay informed about budget consumption without constantly checking timelogs.
• Take timely action to address potential overruns.
• Maintain better control over project timelines and resources.

This proactive approach, powered by Wrike's automation and custom fields, has significantly improved our ability to manage project budgets and keep our projects on track.

We've found this to be an invaluable way to reduce risk, and to give peace of mind to our project owners.

Identifying and Categorizing Risks:
We track risks by ensuring tasks are never forgotten, using Wrike's due date reminders and task dependencies to stay on top of deadlines.

Tracking and Managing Risks:
Wrike’s task status tracking, custom workflows, and task history help us monitor risks and remember past challenges to avoid repeating mistakes.

Custom Workflows and Dashboards:
We use custom workflows and dashboards to keep track of risks across projects, providing visibility into potential issues early.

Team Communication and Risk Updates:
With task comments, notifications, and shared calendars, we ensure everyone stays informed on changes and updates in real time.

Tips for New Users:
Leverage recurring tasks, dependencies, and task templates to stay organized, and regularly update tasks to keep the team aligned.

Unmet Needs:
It would be great if Wrike could offer predictive analytics to help flag potential risks based on past project trends.  Unless it is something already available we are not using properly.  We are far from expert users of Wrike

Amazing insights, huge thank you for sharing, folks! Our team is keeping a very close eye here 👀

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

Yes!  Wrike.com is very important to show compliance evidence that the company to which I work for has a Risk Management Project (Program or System).  If a company is registered to be ISO compliant, most ISO standards require evidence that a Risk Management Project/Program/System is in place showing the assessed risks, the planned mitigation and treatment of those risks, the assignment/custodian of the monitoring of the risks and evidence that the risks are reviewed at least annually.  I have also had to add the Supply Chain Risk Assessment to show the contingency plan should the available treatments become unavailable for the originally listed risks treatments.  This includes 3PL service providers.

Thank you, Wrike.com, for being an easy go-to website source to show the ISO Registrar and 3rd Party Auditors that our companies are in compliance!  😊🙏

Hi Robert Tanner, it sounds like you're doing a lot of what we're trying to do. It would be great to catch up, not sure how to do that though!

Phil

Thank you for sharing, Robert Tanner! We are glad to hear that Wrike has helped with your company's compliance efforts and risk management needs 😊🙏

Rohan V Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Rohan V Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

All,

I would like to add that because of the Wrike.com layout and features that I am able to not only utilize Wrike.com for the created Risk Management Project (Program or System) site, but also to be compliant for the ISO 27001 Information Security Management System (ISMS) standard, I use the available Wrike.com table features and layout to satisfy the RASCI (Responsible, Accountable, Supportive, Consulted, and Informed) requirement. 

I mention this because the custodians assigned to the Risk Management Project risks and Supply Chain risks can be linked to those listed to the applicable (and most of the time) on a one-to-one correlation between the RASCI Security Control custodian assignments to those listed as custodians to the listed Assessed Risks and Supply Chain Assessed Risks.

This method has been working out great for the ISO audits and makes showing compliance easier using Wrike.com as a centralized location for the Risk Management Assessment, the Supply Chain Assessment and the RASCI Matrix assignements.

I hope this helps! 

Hello everyone!
As part of the Wrike team we would like to give you a huge thank you to everyone who joined the conversation on Risk Management! We truly appreciate your insights, experiences, and suggestions, they’re incredibly valuable as we work to enhance Wrike’s capabilities in this area. Your feedback plays a key role in shaping improvements, and we’ll be sure to keep you updated as we make progress. Stay tuned for more updates, please keep the feedback coming, and thanks again for being part of this community!

This is a fascinating discussion thread, and I am astonished that Wrike doesn't have built in RAID capability and that every customer is expected to build their own RAID management solution using custom fields and automations.

When you're managing multimillion dollar projects it is vital to be able to log and monitor risks, issues, actions, and decisions, consistently and accurately. And also to be able to see links between them. e.g. if a risk eventuates it should automatically trigger an issue with a link between the two.

I can see how we could use an automation to create a custom issue item, but is it possible to update a custom field in that issue item with the risk item number? And then update a custom field in the risk item with the issue item number? And also copy other data from the risk item to the issue item?

I also don't see any way to use a risk matrix to calculate a risk rating based on likelihood and consequence. This means Project Managers have to refer to a chart in order to pick the correct rating for each risk, instead of it being applied automatically. This increases the chance of ratings being applied inconsistently across projects or even within projects!

Our two ISO Projects handle these concerns by listing all the risks and manually assigning a risk value by doing exactly what you said...referring to the Risk Value chart for each risk.  The Risk Management Matrix is maintained and updated between two mandatory Risk Management Reviews that occur approximately every five months during each calendar year.

During each meeting, Project Management again reviews the risks and their assigned risk values.  Project Management determines to leave the risk, the assessment, the treatment and/or the assigned value "as-is", or makes any necessary changes and updates to the risks and/or their values.

I agree it would be very beneficial and reduce the amount of manual time to upkeep and mange if automatic.  Maybe link to issued nonconformances, recorded discoveries or observations for improvement? Could the P6 line-item codes be linked to the risk item? 🤷‍♂️

So many possibilities! 😊

I thought I had a solution to the Risk Rating Matrix issue, but I've run into yet another limitation in Wrike - you can't use custom formula fields in automations!

I created a couple of databases:

In my Risk custom item type I have database fields looking up the Likelihood and Consequence and returning the score.

e.g. If you select Likely you get a likelihood score of 4, and if you select Moderate you get a Consequence score of 3

Then I have a custom formula field Risk Rating Score which multiplies the two together.

I was hoping to use this Risk Rating Score with a few automations to select the rating from the risk matrix.

e.g. 20 or over is Critical, 10 to 19 is High, 5 to 9 is Medium, 4 or below is Low.

The issue is I can't use the Risk Rating Score in an automation because it's a a custom formula field! Very frustrating because I'm so close to a solution!

Thanks a lot for posting Mat Ward!

I can see you also upvoted this Product Feedback post, and we asked our Product team to provide an update there 👍

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

Hitesh Karkal we now have expression language in automation for outlook notifications. check it out as it may help you with the notifications gap you alluded to. 

Miron Mizrahi Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Miron Mizrahi Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover