Now that you're ready to assess your risks in Jira... how do you go about it, without growing new white hairs?
What's in this article:
- Let's look at the pains and dreams of risk managers, product managers and project managers, and what it is they're looking to achieve with a risk management tool.
- Then we take a look at Hedge in detail; a super easy-to-use Jira risk management plugin built in Forge, and designed to turn the risk management process in Jira into something simple for everyone involved! Who benefits from it? How does it simplify the process? Read on to find out more...
What is risk management?
To put it simply, risk management is about planning better for the future; in a way that is more realistic, pragmatic. You want to make sure your project stays on track and within budget by:
- Identifying potential risks
- Trying to reduce them
- Being able to explain your decisions
Why do risk management?
There are a few reasons why we do risk management; the foundation of which is to ultimately 👉 prevent failure:
- Prevent and plan for negative events
- Know what to do when something goes wrong
- Know how to recover from disaster faster
- Have a team that can execute steps immediately without much support
- Improve communication between stakeholders
- Minimize the number of events you cannot control
Prevent and plan for negative events
Who
Business owner
Need
“I’d rather nothing bad happens to my business, but in case it does, I want everyone to be able to recover swiftly”
Context
- Learn how to run a successful business or team
- Excited about practices that can help them
- Wish to incorporate these practices into their day-to-day work
Deliver projects on time and within budget
Who
Manager
Need
“I want to deliver projects on time and within budget, and avoid missing my deadlines because of time and resources wasted on things that don’t matter”
Context
- Looking for a way to improve the process
- Interested in best practices and new ways of doing things
Why do we fail to do risk management?
Before we move on to how you should go about creating your own risk management process, let’s go back to the beginning for a second. What is stopping you from pursuing risk management in your project, in the first place? Here are a couple of ideas:
- The policies are complex, or simply too hard to read
- Risk management is boring
- Risk management takes too much time, and costs an arm and a leg
- It’s hard to get the team and company onboard with everything
- It’s hard to track the progress of those actions that can mitigate risks
What is risk assessment?
We use the term risk assessment (or hazard identification) to explain the general process of identifying those risk factors that can possibly bring about trouble in the future. I’m going over it quickly here because we’ve got another article specifically about risk assessment, if you’re interested in knowing more!
Once you’ve identified your risk, the next thing to do is analyze the risk and evaluate it. That’s where you figure out the severity of the risk and the measures you should take to manage it.
What is Hedge risk management plugin?
Hedge is a risk management tool for Jira Cloud, that is built for managers who like it simple and easy. Really… Why make it hard on yourself when a Jira risk management app can actually take care of the risk management process for you!
Hedge offers an easy way to register, assess and prioritize risks in Jira; but that’s not all. You’re also able to monitor progress and link risks to the company’s day to day work in Jira. Hedge is fast-to-set-up, features out-of-the-box risk management templates to choose from and customize, alongside the option to generate risk reports with a single click.
Who is Hedge risk management app built for?
Hedge is a Jira risk management tool that works really well for founders, CxOs and managers; in a plethora of contexts:
- IT security (Cyber risk) 🔐
- Finance 💵
- Business operation 💼
- Insurance 🚩
- Healthcare 🏥
- Medium and small businesses 🌱
- Large organizations 🌳
- Risk managers
- Risk and Compliance teams
- Project managers
What is the target audience for Hedge?
Let’s look at the people who can benefit from handing their risk management process to Hedge!
The risk manager
Risk manager responsibilities 📝
- Figure out the financial, safety and security risks for the organization
- Find ways to reduce overall risks by planning and solving problems
- Figure things out like risk assessment and risk evaluation
- Present findings to the team in a way that is simple
- Think out of the box and catch those risks others don’t notice
Risk manager pains 🤕
- Cross-department communication is a pain
- Hard to keep track and follow up on risk mitigation
- Teams aren’t exactly happy about doing risk management
- Failure to identify risk before it’s too late
- The company doesn't use their work on risk assessments – all for nothing
Risk manager dreams 🏖️
- Make an impact in the organization
- Solve things while preparing the company for challenges
- Hit the goals successfully – team or company
The product manager
Product manager responsibilities 📝
- Strategize about products “CEO of products”
- Set product vision, business value, strategy, product roadmap
- Identify customer pain points
- Put together the functionality of a product + write user stories
- Ship the product, alongside software engineers, designers, QA, analysts and others in the product development team
- Manage the product stakeholders and align with product strategy
Product manager pains 🤕
- Deal with difficult stakeholders
- Never have enough time to do everything
- Lack confidence in the roadmap and strategy
- Fail to understand the effort required from a technical perspective
- Fail to align the team on a vision
- Waste a lot of time on meetings
- Fail to manage the development team’s deadlines for building features
Product manager dreams 🏖️
- Build better products faster
- Have more time for everything
- Build products that users enjoy using
The project manager
Project manager responsibilities 📝
- Oversee operations for individual projects
- Assess time, budget and resources to complete the work
- Report to upper management on project progress and changes
- Collaborate with project managers or team leads
Project manager pains 🤕
- Ignorance about project status
- Fail to deliver project on time and within budget
- Set unrealistic deadlines
- Fail to keep the project on track, according to the plan
- Stakeholders changing priorities on their own
- Dependencies between projects can be a pain to manage
Project manager dreams 🏖️
- Projects that run smoothly
- Learn new ways of doing things with every project
- Help everyone on the team feel like they matter
- Believe in the project and its impact
How can Hedge help with the risk management process?
Hedge helps you manage many aspects of the risk management process:
- Know what to do when/if something goes wrong
- Minimize the number of project events that are out of your control
- Manage to include the team in your risk management process
- Get stakeholders to trust your capabilities and the plan you’ve put together for the project
How does Hedge risk management plugin help?
- It greatly simplifies the risk management process by offering guidance throughout
- Helps with your risk assessment process, as well as risk prioritization, so you can easily identify the most important risks
- Offers quick access to a customizable risk register where you can easily register your risks
- Helps you prioritize risks based on key metrics and factors that you can customize
- Calculates the risk score and level automatically for you when prioritizing
- Provides risk assessment templates for you to choose from, unless you’d rather create your own
- Gives you the reports you need on-the-go, to track project risk health, mitigation issues and so on
How is Hedge helpful for beginners in Jira specifically?
Hedge is designed to simplify the risk management process in Jira; it really doesn’t get easier than that!
1. It’s super easy to set up and use
Hedge is so easy to set up, you wouldn’t believe; it actually takes less than a minute to do! And once you’re in, all you need to do is simply import your Jira issues into Hedge as risks, and boom you’re done! These issues include all of the links (to the resources) your team needs to deal with the risk.
Not only that, but your risk scores get automatically calculated for you; and… you get a risk matrix to visualize all of these risks in a single place in Jira!
2. It will guide you throughout
The Hedge risk management app helps guide you through the risk management process in Jira altogether.
For example, Hedge helps you identify the most important risks to mitigate. One mitigation strategy you can do in Hedge is to create a process for your team that they can then use in the case of a risk happening. Which allows your team to execute the steps immediately, without much support; meaning better communication and faster disaster recovery.
“Don’t panic, just follow the steps!”
3. Creates your reports for you
With Hedge, you get access to a set of reports you’ll need to track your risks; and for further flexibility, you even get to add your own risk factors to customize the process as much as you want.
Stakeholders will have no choice but to get on board with your plan, given you’ve always got the needed data and graphs to support your decisions!
We all know how hard it can be for new project managers to win the trust of their stakeholders sometimes. Hedge will allow you to showcase your critical thinking, alongside your ability to plan and deal with potential negative events, so you can gain your stakeholders’ confidence early on.
Hedge features that help:
- Risk registers with risk scores before and after mitigating risks
- Risk reports where stakeholders can see progress (includes risks raised over time)
4. It will save you so much trouble
Once you know what the most important risks are, you can easily work on mitigating them and preventing their visit! You’re then able to minimize the number of negative events you cannot control.
Hedge features that help keep you safe:
- Risk register and risk scoring
- Risk matrix and reports that help you identify high risks that aren’t yet mitigated
- Risks are issues in Jira; they can include all kinds of links to the resources you need
5. Your team will love Hedge
It’s simple really; Hedge will, for sure, help your team align on the risk management process, making it super easy for them to raise risks in their daily workflow.
Teams get full access to risk registers and reports, which helps them become more aware, involved and included! At the end of the day, it’s important that your team understands the problem and knows how to manage it. Give them the right methods and tools that can help them voice their concerns and say goodbye to micromanaging!
Hedge features that will help your team:
- Risk registers in Jira
- The ability to raise risks by the team
- If you use Jira Work Management or Jira Service Management for your projects, you can create a form to help you collect risks more easily (this isn’t part of Hedge but a default in Jira, which makes for a great addition to our solution)
Why choose Hedge for risk management in Jira?
To summarize for you; Hedge is the best option for risk management in Jira, it simply doesn't get easier than this:
- Very simple setup, within a minute
- Easy UI and performance
- Customizable in many ways
- Provides an expert approach to work
- Makes the process more fun for the team
- Cheaper than other Jira options
- Free for teams of 10 Jira users and less!