Spotlight on SpiraPlan 6.0 - Enterprise Risk Management | Inflectra

Spotlight on SpiraPlan 6.0 - Enterprise Risk Management

February 5th, 2019 by inflectra


Introducing Risk Management to SpiraPlan

One of the key new features in the latest version of SpiraPlan is a new risk management system. Previously, SpiraPlan simply had a type of incident that was classed as Risk, however this limited the functionality that we could provide for managing risks. In the new version, Risks are a completely distinct artifact type (similar to requirements, test cases, etc.) with their own types (business, technical, schedule, etc.), attributes and workflows:

In addition, Risks have special attributes for analyzing and categorizing how important they are:


This means that risks that are likely to happen with serious consequences will appear higher up in the lists than risks that are less likely to happen and/or have less serious consequences.




The risk probabilities and impacts can of course be customized by a project template administrator:

Risk Management Process

A standard risk management workflow typically has the following five phases:


Accordingly, the default workflow for a risk in SpiraPlan has been created to implement these best practices out of the box:

As with all artifacts in SpiraPlan, you will be able to customize the steps, transitions (actions) and permissions associated with risk workflows, as well as specify which fields are required, hidden or disabled at each workflow state.

Risk Mitigations

One of the key phases of Risk Management is identification and analysis of the mitigations that can reduce or eliminate the impact of the risk, should it happen. SpiraPlan provides built-in native support for adding and tracking the various mitigations to the risk, with the ability to specify individual review dates for each mitigation




Typically the Mitigations list is used to identify the ways that the risk can be addressed, whereas the tasks are the specific actions that different project members will need to take to act on the mitigations. The tasks have a status, priority, effort and date and will be visible in the standard SpiraPlan task lists and Kanban board.

Risk Audit Trail




Risk Reporting and Risk Cube


  1. A risk register that lists the most important risks (measured by their composite exposure score)


roadmap spotlight spiraplan risk management risks