Risk Assessments
Regardless of the type of research you do, whether you are using secondary data, or you work in laboratory, or you are a qualitative researcher conducting interviews, things will come up that can throw your timeline off course (Hello COVID-19). Noone thinks that you are incompetent when incidents arise, that is life. However, it is important that you think through as many of these potential incidents as possible so that you can have a (a) mitigation plan in place to reduce the chance of it happening, and (b) a contingency plan for things that can’t be mitigated.
When writing a grant application, somewhere along the lines you’ll be asked for a risk assessment. This might just be a couple of lines within the research programme, or it might be a full separate document that you are asked to upload. Because DTA fellows work across a huge range of disciplines, it is difficult to outline specific risks that you might face, so instead this blog is aimed to help you find a way to present risk information in a concise and precise way. Remember, the general flow of a risk assessment is identifying the risks, explaining what measures you will put in place to mitigate the risk happening, and reassuring the reviewer that if the risk does happy that you have a contingincy plan in place. It is also a good idea to include some kind of assessment of how likely the risk is to happen, and how severe the repercussion would be to project.
Although we are not going to go into detail on the types of risk you might plan for, general areas to think about include technical risks (e.g., what happens if your equipment or software malfunctions?), implementation risks (e.g., what if participants drop out, or a work plackage takes way longer than expected, or you go over budget?), data risks (e.g., what if private data is leaked or you lose data because of a software fault?), and societal risks (e.g., does your research pose a negative impact on the community, policy or government legislation?).
Presenting part of Work Package Table
One way to present risks is within your work package (WP) table. You might decide to outline the overarching objective for that WP, the timeframe and location of the WP, descriptions of the tasks you plan to complete, lists of the WP deliverables and key milestones, and conclude with a couple of potential risks, how you plan to mitigate them, as well as indicate the corresponding likelihood and severity. Example of how the table might look is below.
Presenting as a Separate Document
You might decide to instead list the risks and then subsequently list the measures to overcome them. For example, in my work as exercise scientist typical risks that come up in ethical applications include blood draws and pain/infection, exercise testing and cardiovascular events, focus groups and confidentiality, exercise dependence and mental health issues, and personal information and loss of privacy. After listing these possible risks, I would then go on to describe how I will mitigate against them, e.g., outlining inclusion and exclusion criteria, consent and screening procedures, safe and calibrated equipment, and high standard of training and competence within research team. For example:
Identification of risk:
Risk. Why it is a risk
Risk. Why it is a risk...
Example: (a) Blood draw. Unsafe blood draw can result in excess bleeding, pain and infection at the blood collection site. Further, the research doing the blood draw could be unnecessarily exposed to bloodborne viruses if they use sub-standard protocols and equipment or are not sufficiently train and supervised.
Measures planned for identified risks:
Risk:
Planned mitigation measure 1
Planned mitigation measure 2....
Example:
(a) Blood Draw:
- A detailed blood draw standardised operating procedure document will be developed that contains information on what equipment is needed, how to set up equipment and prepare for the draw, how to orientate the participate, and detailed step by step instructions on how to carry out the blood draw.
- The research fellow will have comprehensive training led by X. to demonstrate competency before independently drawing blood on participants, the research fellow will need to have X successful blood draws supervised by X.
Presenting as a Short Paragraph
You might have only a very small amount of space to talk about the risks and how you are going to overcome them. If so, you should great create with your formatting. Using abbreviations can be helpful, e.g., link the risk to a work package where you have previously given details, using bold or underlining, using different colour fonts. Example:
1) Difficulty meeting recruitment targets (WP4). Likelihood: low | Severity: high. Mitigation - engagement with HSE & regional media. Provision of participant incentives. Contingency - review inclusion criteria to broaden prospective participant pool. 2) High drop out from intervention (WP6). Likelihood: moderate | Severity: moderate. Mitigation - regular communication via preferred methods, non-invasive measures, flexible lab visit calendar. Contingency - reduce number/duration of lab visits. 3)....
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