Issues and risks

Issues capture defects and change items already raised against project work. Risks capture potential trouble, with probability, impact, mitigation and an owner. They belong to projects, so a delivery lead can connect a warning to the work and schedule it may affect. The Exception Triage page brings overdue tasks and milestones, fixed issues awaiting verification and leading open risks into one queue with a path to the record.

• Issue triage. An issue needs severity while Open; Issue Triage moves a valid issue to Triaged and records an operation receipt.
• Risk ownership. A risk has category, probability, impact, mitigation and owner for follow-up.
• Project context. Both records link to the project, allowing a manager to review exceptions alongside delivery dates.

Define when a team member raises an issue rather than updating a task description. For defects, include a title that another person can recognize and a reporter note with enough context to reproduce or assess the problem. Give severity a shared meaning. An Open issue without severity cannot pass the triage guard, so the QA Engineer should check it before asking the workflow to act. Decide who owns the issue after triage and who verifies a fix.

For risks, agree how Low, Medium and High probability and impact are assessed. Record a mitigation and owner at the point where the risk becomes actionable. A risk marked Monitoring still needs a person to revisit it. Review open risks before a dated milestone, particularly when schedule or resource exposure could change the project plan.

A QA Engineer raises an issue against the release project after finding a failure during review. Set severity to High and choose an owner. Issue Triage should move the issue from Open to Triaged and write a successful receipt. Open Issues should now show it. Rehearse a second Open issue without severity: the triage attempt should leave its status alone and write a failed receipt. This distinguishes a blocked action from a completed triage.

Next record a schedule risk for a dependency that may delay a milestone. Add its probability, impact, mitigation and owner. The Project Manager should find it in Risks to Monitor and use Exception Triage to check whether it has become a leading open risk. If the risk becomes real, inspect the affected task and milestone and decide whether to update the project status. For a fixed issue, leave verification to the responsible person before marking it Verified.

• Open Issues — QA and managers inspect raised and triaged work by severity and owner.
• Risks to Monitor — Leads review open exposure and the person responsible for mitigation.
• Exception Triage — Owners jump from a delivery exception to its source record.

Use exception response for triage and delivery control for the resulting schedule decision.