Manage risks and issues

A risk has not happened yet; an issue has. That distinction decides which register an entry belongs in, and the two are scored differently because you do different things with them.

Add a risk

Open Risks and choose + Add Risk.

Field	Notes
Title	Required. State the risk as a thing that could happen, not a topic.
Category	Technical, Schedule, Cost, Resource, External, Quality, Scope, or Other.
Probability	How likely, on a five-point scale.
Impact	How bad, on a five-point scale.
Risk Score	Derived from the two.
Response Strategy	Avoid, Mitigate, Transfer, or Accept.
Risk Owner	The person watching it.
Mitigation Plan	What reduces the likelihood or the damage.
Contingency Plan	What you do if it happens anyway.

Score honestly rather than defensively. A register where everything is medium/medium tells a steering group nothing, and the point of the two axes is to separate the things that are merely annoying from the ones that would end the project.

The response strategy is a commitment, not a label. Accept is a legitimate answer, but it means somebody has decided to live with the consequence, so write the contingency plan for it.

Add an issue

Open Issues and choose + Add Issue.

Field	Notes
Title	Required.
Priority	Low, Medium, High, or Critical — how soon it needs attention.
Severity	Minor, Moderate, Major, or Severe — how much damage it is doing.
Status	Open, In Progress, Resolved, Closed, or Won’t Fix.
Due Date	When it needs to be dealt with.
Assigned To	Who is dealing with it.

Priority and severity are separate on purpose. A cosmetic problem on the launch screen can be severe-looking and low priority; a silent data error can be minor to look at and critical to fix.

Keep the dashboard truthful

Both registers feed the dashboard’s Quality tile, which counts open issues and active risks, and both put a count badge on their nav item. Those badges only count what is open: risks that are not closed, and issues that are neither closed nor resolved.

That makes closing entries part of the job rather than housekeeping. A register nobody closes reports a project as permanently in trouble, and people stop reading the tile.

Record what you learned

When a risk materialises or an issue turns out to be systemic, Lessons Learned takes the write-up as a success, an improvement, or a failure. It is the section that survives the project, and the one most worth filling in while the detail is fresh.

For how these feed reporting, see Report on progress.