Optimizing Risk Communication to Ease Risk Management

Risk management can be difficult to apprehend for partners and customers when it comes to defining tasks and responsibilities through the project´s development phases. What are the risks related to the final product in development? What are the concerns regarding the process? The overall project? What residual risks the end users shall be informed of when integrating, operating and maintaining the developed solutions? The struggle becomes even more complex when stakeholders have different experiences with risk management or have existing infrastructure which involves improving competences or update technologies and need the allocation of the right resource. One role of the risk management is to prepare the stakeholders to take the ownership of their own risks. As overcoming these gaps can be challenging, a communication practice has been developed and used for the European project E-LAND (EU Horizon 2020) in 2019. The aim was to gradually increase the risk understanding by focusing on risk communication and enable the stakeholders taking over their own risks. This emphasis on communication has also been applied in other European projects since, on internal company assessment activities, in different domain applications (energy, digitization, AI and data management). This article presents an update on the risk communication method as lessons learned from a risk management point of view. This paper is sharing some of the difficulties to adapt the risk communication to the project's specificities as its domain application, type and knowledge of the partners, ways of working. The paper describes main challenges when performing risks management (boundaries of the study, difficulties to convince the project management, improvement in templates to the application...). The feedback received from the partners show that this way of performing risk communication has led to an easier risk collection and an increased understanding of the risks by the end of the project.

Keywords: Risk communication, Risk analysis, Risk perception, Risk management, Lessons learned, European risk management project, Adaptation.