Project & Development
Project Risk Register: Score by Likelihood and Impact, Act Early
Opened by the project lead in the first week, then reopened at the monthly risk review. The whiteboard leads with a likelihood-by-impact matrix that sets priority, plus a mindmap of where risks come from, a table of the four responses - avoid, reduce, transfer, accept - and the rules that keep the register from going stale. The task board runs from Identified through Assessing, Responding and Monitoring to Closed, and starts with five parent tasks - identify, score, respond, monitor and review - each with its own subtasks.
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Use it when the project keeps hitting things nobody saw coming, or when a risk list got built once and nobody has looked at it since. It's for project leads searching for how to build a risk register template, and for anyone who needs a shared scale for scoring likelihood and impact. It suits projects with many stakeholders and real uncertainty, like system development, event ops, or a new business launch.
In What This Register Is For, agree the purpose, how to write each entry in one line, and what not to log. Work through Where Risks Come From as a team, surfacing risks from scheduling to dependencies and legal exposure. Place what surfaces on the two axes in Likelihood x Impact to decide what to tackle first. Sort the top items into Four Ways to Respond, noting both the response and what to keep on record. Run it day to day using the rules in Keeping the Register Alive, moving cards through Identified, Assessing, Responding, Monitoring, Closed.
In week one, finish List by category and Agree the scales, and your scoring won't drift once you start. Writing Define the triggers makes it easier to know when to act. Review monthly, not weekly — thirty minutes to scan everything and update only entries whose scores changed is enough to keep it alive.
Once you have a free account, you can copy this template from the marketplace
