iTest Quality Partners

Download the Project Risk Assessment Calculator (PRAC) tool.

The Project Risk Assessment Calculator (PRAC) is a self-assessment tool designed to help project managers, IT leaders, and their business customers understand the various risks their project is facing and to offer suggestions on mitigating those risks.

PRAC is based on a proprietary iTQP model. This model has been developed over several decades of consulting, research, and analysis comprising literally thousands of information technology projects of all kinds, sizes, and technologies.

A key conclusion derived from this research is that uncertainty is the source of all project problems. Further, the sources of this uncertainty, the risks, are represented by a relatively small number of factors. These risk factors drive uncertainty, which ultimately reveals itself in the project outcomes along four dimensions:

Delays
Overruns
Failures
Unsatisfied customers

PRAC has been designed to assist project and executive management in identifying those risks, quantifying their impact on the project’s goals, and offering suggestions for mitigating those risks.

PRAC is best suited for projects whose goal is to deliver business solutions composed of software and hardware technology together with their associated business process, user training, and organizational transition activities. The model applies to new development projects, software package acquisitions, as well as on going application maintenance efforts.

What Is Risk?

Risk is simply the likelihood that the project’s outcomes will not deliver the benefits defined by the project’s business case. In other words, risk is a measure of the unsoundness of the project as a business investment.

The risk factors that drive uncertainty are composed of individual elements. Each element in PRAC consists of a definition and a risk value. The element definitions describe a best practice or an environmental context whose presence or absence correlates strongly with overall project risk. These element definitions are designed to permit simple yes or no assessments—the desired practice, condition, or context is either present, or it is not. If the assessment is negative, then the associated risk value is added to the total aggregate risk score. A project’s total risk score is the sum of these risk values for all factors and their elements. The lower the risk score, the more likely the project will be a success and deliver the proposed returns on its investment.

Finally, to facilitate remedial actions the risk factors are organized into categories. These categories group risks around common root causes.

To use PRAC, the project manager assesses each risk element several times throughout the life cycle starting, ideally, during the early business case and planning stages, and continuing through implementation and project completion. Assessments are always based on either the actual current project situation, or the situation as planned. In this way, each project assessment represents a snapshot of the total project risk at that point in time.

The objective of the project manager is to drive the aggregate project risk score to zero by incorporating the best practices (or their equivalent) specified by all the risk elements whose assessments were negative. In this way, the PRAC assessment becomes its own action plan for the project manager by clearly and unambiguously highlighting the specific project attributes that must change, and how they must change.

PRAC has been implemented as a Microsoft Access application. The PRAC database contains the Risk Assessment Work Sheets for all projects, both open and closed, and a set of tools for analyzing the risks and suggesting corresponding improvements.