Project Management - How to Analyze Project Risks

A risk register is the project's living list of things that might happen and would matter, each with an estimate of likelihood and impact, a planned response, an owner and a review date.

Stakeholder management is the practice of identifying everyone who affects or is affected by a project, understanding what each wants and can do, and engaging them deliberately so that the project keeps the support it needs and hears the objections while they are cheap.

Change control is the process by which a proposed change to a project's agreed baseline is recorded, assessed for its effect on scope, schedule, cost and risk, and then approved, rejected or deferred by a person holding the authority to do so.

A day rate sells a bounded unit of a supplier's working time rather than a finished result, so the client rather than the supplier carries the risk that the job turns out bigger than it looked.

A client brief is the short written statement of what a piece of work has to achieve, for whom, and under which fixed constraints, agreed before either side commits to a solution.

A statement of work is the document that commits one bounded piece of work to paper: what gets built, on which assumptions, to what deadline, for what money, and what sits outside it.