Introduction to event

4.13 RISK MANAGEMENT 
Event managers are always an easy target when event don‘t go to plan. Regardless of 
the circumstances, everyone wonders whether the project manager could have 
foreseen and prevented the risk before it became an issue .Events sponsors don‘t 
appreciate changes and good risk management is one way of avoiding surprise. 
Risks are often not urgent which means many event managers fail to consider risks 
as seriously as they should. You can stay on top of your event by controlling risk, 

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Event Management HM-402 
Uttarakhand Open University 
73 
and actively mitigating against it as far as you can. The skill for effective risk 
management is really experience – it‘s knowing what could go wrong. As event 
manager you first need to identify risk and the earlier you do that, the better your 
chances of avoiding the risk occurrence. 
It doesn‘t end there, however. Risk identification must be followed by a risk plan for 
what to do about them. This involves assigning a probability, a cost, an owner and 
using mitigation strategies that are suitable for the risk and the appetite for the client 
for things going wrong. These action plans need to be incorporated into your main 
plan and tracked as well. 
Effectively managing that risk has massive benefits. Your clients are going to be 
happier because you are able to improve delivery for your clients and be more 
efficient with your clients‘ resources to provide them with better value for money. 
But it‘s not all about them – you get get the added benefit of finding yourself 
spending less time on problems and unnecessarily fire fighting unwelcome 
surprises. The event manager risk management skill to master is the ability to 
identify risks well before they become issues, and come up with effective mitigation 
plans so that the risk of them ever becoming issues is nullified.