DFMEA "Risks" Log by Project
In a recent post a user asked if anyone managed a risk log within Wrike. I'm posting this to share how we manage risks for our own projects.
We frequently have 20+ product development projects running concurrently throughout the year. We use a project template to kickoff each project with about 30 high-level tasks per project. We perform DFMEAs on every project and used to just log them in an Excel spreadsheet. However, that Excel sheet would get lost as an attachment in the sea of tasks we swim in, and makes it difficult to view DFMEA issues for multiple projects in a meeting.
To mitigate this and allow for quick access to DFMEA actions and status, I created a log folder in each project. However, I did not want to see every task in my table, only the tasks related to DFMEAs.
I created a drop-down custom field titled CATEGORY which allows me to quickly assign a category to specific tasks for filtering.
As you can see, I have numerous categories to choose from depending on the type of reports I need to generate, but that's covered in a different post.
When logging the potential failures our products might see in use, I like to work in the Table view (New Table is my preference). This allows me to just type and tab over as if I'm working in Excel to populate all of the other custom fields. As you can see below, I have a workflow specific to DFMEAs, and the following custom fields: FAILURE MODE, EFFECT OF FAILURE, SEVERITY (number), CAUSE OF FAILURE, OCCURRENCE (number), DESIGN CONTROL, and DETECTION (number). Severity, occurrence, and detection all need to be defined as "Numbers" for the custom field type to allow for report level calculations.
Now, when I run a report I can filter by Category > DFMEA and group by Parent Folder to see multiple projects at a time.
In the report, I add the calculated column "RPN" (risk priority number) which multiplies the severity, occurrence, and detection values.
From RPN, I can determine if action needs to be taken based on our threshold criteria of 100 or greater, and sort from high to low to quickly see the status of each risk.
We can also see which projects have not had a DFMEA run yet to ensure those are addressed as well. In the design phase of our project template, we have a workflow status that indicates we need to run a DFMEA. This prevents us from unknowingly moving past this process.
I hope some of you find this helpful. I would also love to hear any suggestions you have for me to improve our process.
Cheers!
This is insanely helpful, thank you, Trevor!
I've featured it on the Community homepage, and I'd encourage anyone reading here to let us know if you're doing something like this already, or if this has helped you, give the post a thumbs up 🙂
Thanks, Stephen!
As a colleague of Trevors',allow me to give a ringing endorsement of this tool he's created within wrike!
It's excellent stuff, Greg, you've a clever colleague! 😎
I've already sent the link onto our Customer Success Managers so they can direct users here to show how a Risk log like this can be achieved.
@Trevor, looking forward to reading more tips, tricks or best practices 👏
Wow! This is awesome. Nice work @Trevor -
I am trying to develop a Risk Register in Wrike (Wrike newbie). Are there any step-by-step videos on this?
Hi Lea Labastida,
I have not made a video of this, but if you have any specific questions or steps you are getting stuck, I am happy to answer what I can.
Cheers!
Trevor
Trevor,
I am stuck in the beginning. For example, do You create a project and call that the Risk Register and add risks there for every project. Or is this a Risk Registry task in each project? Just having a hard time picturing the beginning that is why I enquire about videos.
I am grateful for any tips to get me started as a Wrike Newbie creating a Risk Register!
Hi Lea Labastida,
No worries! I will do my best to get you un-stuck. For our business, it makes the most sense to have a risk register in every project, because most projects are unique products. If we do come across variations of the same product (such as color or branding changes), then we will reference the existing log by tagging those tasks into the new project log. You can see in the task below that I just added the "Product B" log folder to this specific risk task.
We used to separate our risks log into a sub-folder of the project (see image below), but now it is a series of sub-tasks for the parent task that log informs (still project specific though). We found that the action items from the risk register would get left behind or forgotten about because they were not tied to the specific task that needed to validate those actions were complete. However, I think both methods can work well. We're still vetting the sub-task method versus sub-folder.
Hopefully this helps get you started. Let me know if you have any further questions.
Cheers!