Risk Analysis

Oil exploration is a notoriously risky business. Add in the physical risk of deep water drilling and you can easily understand why risk analysis and management takes on a really high profile in the off shore drilling industry.
DNV is a long established maritime certification organisation and, with the North Sea oil boom, has moved naturally into the off shore oil exploration risk management and certification business.
This paper describes an approach to risk management for deep water exploration. It is written with a general approach and is adaptable to other styles of project and product.
A couple of perspectives that make it particularly interesting:
The risk analysis - and management plan - will be different for the organisation executing the project and for the contractors;
The categorisation of risks by Economy, Time and Performance - equivalent to Cost, Schedule and Scope. The familiar Probability/Impact matrices are represented for each of these and the authors use an interesting method of plotting the effect of risk mitigation plans on the analysis.
There is also extensive discussion of the risk management process, use of the risk register and communication. It ends with a couple of case studies that illustrate the approach nicely.
DNV Risk Analysis