Risks fall in a few categories, known and unknown. It is extremely important in any project to effectively plan for both with a contingency budget and resources because some will happen. In this class, you are asked to develop a Risk Management Strategy and Plan that identifies potential risks, ranks them by impact and likeliness, contains mitigation strategies, and includes a way to control and communicate them. You will select a project that you may have developed in a previous class or a known project in your organization to create this strategy and plan for.

Throughout this course, you will be working on developing several components of a final Key Assignment. Additional information and the deliverables for each Individual Project will be provided in the assignment description for this project.

In this first Individual Project, you are asked to develop the outline of the sections that will be included in the “Risk Management Strategy and Plan” document and a draft of a proposal to submit to your instructor. The other information you will include is a high-level description of the project you will be conducting the risk analysis on.

You will also be setting up the final Key Assignment outline that you will add to each week. The combined Individual Project (IP) assignments will be your final Key Assignment deliverable.

Project Selection:

The first step will be to select a project that you to develop a risk management strategy and plan for. This project will be used as the basis for each of the assignments throughout the course and should conform to the following guidelines:

1. Nontrivial: The selected project candidate should reflect a real-life project that has at least the major milestones identified.
2. Domain Knowledge: You will be applying knowledge of this project to address assignments related to identifying and analyzing risks.

Select a project that fits these requirements, and submit your proposal to your instructor before proceeding further with the assignments in the course. Approval should be sought within the first few days of the course. Your instructor will tell you how to submit this proposal and what notification will be given for project approval.

Assignment:

Your first task in this process will be to select a project to use as the basis of your Key Assignment. You will also create the shell document for the final project Key Assignment document deliverable that you will be working on throughout the course. As you proceed through each project phase, you will add content to each section of the final document to gradually complete the final project delivery, which is the Risk Management Strategy and Plan.

The following project deliverables:

1. Submit project proposal to instructor for approval
2. Risk Management Strategy and Plan Document Shell
   • Use Microsoft Word
   • Title Page
     1. Course number and name
     2. Project name
     3. Student name
     4. Date
   • Table of Contents
     1. Use auto-generated TOC
     2. Separate page
     3. Maximum of three levels deep
     4. Be sure to update the fields of the TOC so it is up-to-date before submitting your project.
3. Section Headings (create each heading on a new page with TBD as content except for sections listed under “New Content” below)
   1. Project Outline
   2. Risk Management Justification
   3. Project Risks Identification
   4. Project Risks Assessment
   5. Project Risks Responses Strategy
   6. Project Risks Responsibility Plan
   7. Project Risks Monitoring & Control Plan
   8. Project Risks WBS & Budget Updates
   9. Project Risks Communications Plan
4. New Content to be Inserted in Above Shell
   • Project Outline
     1. Brief description of the project. 
     2. The milestones and/or WBS for the project.
     3. Material can be taken from approved proposal submitted to the instructor, and this will serve as the draft for the proposal.
     4. Be sure this project is approved by the instructor.
5. Risk Management Justification
   1. Discuss why risk management is so important to the success of the selected project in a letter to the project sponsor.
   2. Describe the steps that will be used to develop the Risk Management Plan.
   3. Represent this process in a flow diagram as well.
   1. Project Risks Identification
      1. Start brainstorming, at a high level, on some categories where risk could occur in this project (Note: you will continue this brainstorming activity in the next week with specifics, likelihood, and impact).

Name the document yourname_MPM344_IP1.doc, and submit the document for grading.