Managing risk is an important part of any project or programme of activity.
We want to help you deliver your project or activity successfully. All activity involves risk. Thinking about risk helps you take actions to manage threats to the success of your project or activity. This helps you plan what you want to do.
If you do not think about risk, you may encounter issues that affect you, your project or activity, or other people. These issues could be very serious, for example if you fail to think about risks to health and safety.
In many cases risk management allows you to reduce risk a lot. For example some health and safety risks can be reduced by the use of appropriate safety equipment. This reduces the risk to a tolerable level.
Other risks cannot be entirely controlled. You may have to tolerate these risks. Effective risk management helps you to be ready to respond to issues beyond your control should these arise.
Risks to your activity are not just about health and safety – there may be a range of unpredictable elements that could affect the successful delivery of your activity. These might include risks to your proposed timeline, risks to the quality of an experience for participants or strengths of a finished piece.
Risk is a key part of the decision making process for an application to any of our funding programmes, and is something we consider across all parts of your application, including your budget. In your application and any Supporting Documents, we want to understand how you are addressing the full range of risks that could affect your ability to deliver the activity that you’re applying for funds to support.
How should I manage risk?
There are three steps in managing risk:
- Identify. This means thinking through your project or activity to establish potential threats to its successful delivery.
- Assess. This means thinking about the severity of each risk, and how probable it is that the risk might actually occur.
- Control. This means devising a plan to reduce the likelihood of the risk occurring, and/or to reduce the severity of the effects if the risk occurs.
How to identify risks
A good way to start identifying risks is to ask yourself, ‘what's the worst that could happen?’ Don’t try to assess these risks as you think of them. Note them down and assess them later using one of the forms below.
Below are some examples of templates you may wish to use to manage risk when planning a project. If you are submitting a risk assessment as part of an application to Creative Scotland you can use either of these formats, or one of your own – whatever is best suited to identifying, assessing and controlling the risks associated with your activity.