Wanted to share 26 formal risk tools that I teach about and highly recommend you take a look which ones work best for your project.  How do you know which tools to use? Many take a good amount of time, money and skill to properly execute! As early as possible in the project life cycle, formally identify and rate the "Risk Tolerance Levels" of:
  • Sponsor
  • PM (if that is you, then yes, do an assessment of yourself)
  • Key Team Members (with highest influence on project)
  • Customer
  • Organization

It is very important to understand the Risk Tolerance levels, then you should be able to understand the level of resources you are able to invest into Risk Management (and ensure you formally document this to help manage everyone's expectations and ensure all are "on the same page"). 

Listed below are some good Risk Tools that can be utilized to help manage risk (generally speaking, as you go farther down the list they start to become more complex and require more specialized resources) :
  1. Historical information review
  2. Brainstorming
  3. Lateral thinking
  4. Delphi Technique
  5. Checklists
  6. Interviewing
  7. Ranking and indexing
  8. SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats)
  9. Flowcharts and cause and effect diagrams
  10. Risk register or log
  11. What if analysis
  12. Pareto analysis
  13. Fault tree analysis
  14. Risk trigger management
  15. Risk Matrix
  16. Risk Decision tree
  17. Sensitivity Analysis
  18. Statistical sums
  19. Expected monetary value
  20. Risk simulation
  21. Probability distribution
  22. Preliminary risk analysis
  23. Change analysis and management
  24. Root cause analysis
  25. Hazard and operability analysis (HAZOP)
  26. Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA)