When starting a new project, it’s so temping to dive right in with the development of your new product idea. Often resulting in delay, development cost increase and lots of frustrations from the team members when things go wrong.

There’s a tool that can help you prevent most of these issues, called a Project Risk Analysis. And there are more benefits to performing a risk scan on your new product development at the start of every project.

Project uncertainties

When you encounter these types of risks and uncertainties, it’s better to know at project start what you might be facing instead of being surprised when you’re in the middle of it and already have spent money and resources that you’ll never earn back.

Performing a detailed analysis at the beginning of your project, will help you and your team to understand what the possible project risks are and how these risks and uncertainties could affect your project goals.

If you skip this important analysis, it can lead to poor estimates for development costs and project planning, resource planning and other business decisions. You’ll be firefighting unexpected issues instead of navigating your team through projected risks.

Being prepared and meet your project goals

When you perform this risk analysis, you’ll be discussing every possible risk or uncertainty you expect and together with your team you give a rating to the impact and the probability that this risk will occur.

These values together indicate the severity of the risk.

Next to describing the risks and scoring them, you need to define your mitigation tactics when these risks occur. Meaning what action are you going to take, what solution do you have.

Benefits of performing a risk scan on your new product development

When you’re done, you need to draw a conclusion. Are the risks acceptable and you move forward with the actual development of your product? Or are some risks too high and you need to do more research before you can start?

Now you’re ready to really start with your project or developing your new product!

Want to learn more on Project Management in physical product-based businesses?

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