A Guide to Active Risk Management

Digby Harlow
Digby Harlow
April 14, 2023

As a capital improvements program manager, the responsibility is simple: Deliver the program on time, within budget, and with the desired quality. Getting to completion, however, is rarely that simple. Risks in particular are an inevitable part of any program and can impact its outcome if not handled effectively.

Active risk management is the proactive approach of identifying potential risks early in the project, assessing their likelihood and impact, and implementing strategies to mitigate or eliminate them. By proactively managing risks, a CIP program manager can property plan for negative events and thus create their best chance to ensure successful completion. In the event that risks do not eventuate, therein lie opportunities to save time, money, and resources.

It stands to reason then that program managers should use risk management software to help them manage risks proactively, not reactively. Any such software needs to provide a centralized platform to manage risks, track their progress, and take necessary actions to mitigate them.

Here are the benefits of choosing the right software:

Efficient risk management

An active risk management software streamlines the risk management process, allowing project managers to identify, assess, and control risks in real time, ensuring that they are addressed promptly.

Improved communication

The software you deploy should enable capital improvement program managers to communicate effectively with stakeholders and team members. It should act as a common platform to discuss risks, their likelihood and impact, and the strategies to mitigate them.

A project management working group sitting in a meeting room in a corporate building

Compliance with standards

No matter how your organization decides to set up the risk management process, it's ideal that the risk management software you choose incorporates ISO31000 into the system. That way businesses can ensure that their risk management process is aligned with best practices and international standards.

An app screen that shows a scatterplot graph and a table

Integrating risk & cost data together

Ultimately, when risks eventuate, they impact on the schedule and cost to deliver capital  programs. And those impacts can be significant, especially on large programs. Software that adheres to active risk management principles will integrate risk data to insights on schedules and cost impacts. It should not require extra work.

This is one of the key benefits of Mastt’s comprehensive risk management module. Any risk represented in the Mastt system is tied to cost and schedule, saving you entering your data twice (or more!). By tying this data together, Mastt enables operational efficiency, and helps Owners and PM Consultants easily manage potential risks across whole programs of work.

An app screen that shows a capital project dashboard

Real-time Risk Dashboards

What’s even better is with our new ability to add custom reports to create dashboards, you can now add risk reports in a way that meaningfully visualizes your program data.

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