Project risk management software: 7 options to compare

Project risk management software helps you identify, assess, and analyze risks to your immediate project goals and your company more widely. 

Managers are spoiled for choice when it comes to this type of software — which is part of the problem. Search for a new tool, and you’ll find everything from dedicated risk management platforms to compliance monitoring tools to project management systems with risk management features built in. They’re often so technical and industry-specific that it’s tough to decide which is best for your company. 

In this post, I’ll look at what each type of risk management software can do and compare some of the most popular options, starting with Wrike. 

Many of the big-name risk management solutions on the market are standalone tools designed around the legal requirements in different industries, but Wrike is an all-in-one, customizable solution that gives you seamless risk management within your workflow tracking and monitoring, whatever type of projects you take on. 

What can risk management software do for your projects? 

Before I discuss some options, let’s get a handle on the different types of risk management software and what they aim to do — both for your project work and your company more widely. 

You can frame this as a choice between: 

• Dedicated risk management tools: These are project risk management software solutions built to register and score risks within a project. The most powerful tools will visualize the immediate threats to your goals, budget, and deadline within a specific project lifecycle, and the downstream risks as issues ripple out across your company. They tend to pull data from your project and resource management software to make their analyses. 
• Compliance and monitoring tools: These tools monitor your activities to ensure your work meets legal and regulatory requirements, industry standards, or your company’s internal policies. They typically integrate with legal or auditing software, or the tools you use to monitor employee training, manage change, and power your document workflows. They use this data to flag non-compliance so you can deal with it swiftly. 

• Security tools: These tools handle vulnerabilities in your IT infrastructure and risks to the sensitive information you store. The goal is to protect your data and make sure your company can continue to operate if it comes up against a specific risk like a security breach. 

I’ll admit there’s often some overlap here, especially when it comes to enterprise risk management tools that provide holistic risk analysis for the largest companies. With risk management software, you can: 

• Standardize your approach to risk management. This gives you a higher level of protection — both because it uncovers risks you’d otherwise overlook and because it checks you’ve ticked the boxes to keep your work compliant. 
• Document the actions you take to manage risks. This provides an audit trail for you to use later. Plus, when you have a paper trail, you’ll find it easier to find the root cause of any issues that emerge downstream. 
• Visualize risk dependencies between projects or teams. When your software is robust enough to show you how the results of one project affect another team, you see stronger collaboration and better results across your company. 
• Automate the manual tasks involved with risk assessment and analysis. Risk registers and risk mitigation strategies usually boil down to data entry and analysis. When you automate these processes, you remove a source of human error and free up more time to concentrate on your project work. 

When you first start to look for options, you might think the only way to get every benefit is to invest in separate tools for each aspect of risk management. 

But the thing is, using multiple tools requires multiple integrations. Beyond the increased costs and resources involved in implementing three different pieces of software, it’s not easy to build a watertight system when you’re cobbling these tools together with your project management and other connected systems. And if there’s any area where you want to be sure nothing can fall through the cracks, it’s your risk management execution. 

Choosing the best risk management solution for your organization

In contrast to deploying a mix of tools, the first software on my list is Wrike, an all-in-one project management platform with enterprise-level risk management and security features. 

Wrike is a comprehensive, streamlined solution to identify risks to your project success in time to mitigate their potential impact. And, when issues do arise, Wrike makes it easy to adjust your project planning and update your team — all within the same powerful platform. 

Here’s how it works. 

1. Wrike: Seamless risk management for custom projects 

Wrike is a work management platform that gives you unbeatable insights into the way your projects are progressing. At the heart of this oversight, you get insightful predictions and alerts to manage risks across your project portfolio. 

When you manage a project in Wrike, you break your work down into tasks and subtasks, and add them to a centralized space where you can securely monitor your work. You and your team can then track each task through its workflow — for example, as it moves from your backlog, to production, to compliance review, to final approval. As your team executes the tasks, managers can filter the granular project data that’s being generated to see how their performance stacks up to all the different aspects of the project plan. 

Then, when you switch on Wrike’s Project Progress feature, you get AI risk management alerts straight to your inbox. These alerts use the very latest information about your project tasks to assess their risk level, including: 

• The task’s complexity 
• The start and end dates
• Recent activity on the task 
• The number of assignees 
• The number of completed and overdue tasks associated with the project 
• The history of the task owner’s previous projects 

This gives you a timely, reliable picture of the tasks that are most at risk of missing their deadline, overrunning their budget, and having a knock-on negative effect on your project as a whole. Wrike’s project risk management software sets you up to manage threats proactively, not reactively. 

When you can better understand the tasks at low, medium, and high risk in your projects, you can adjust your project schedule and resource allocation to get your project back on track. And because your risk monitoring and decision making are happening in the same platform as every other aspect of your project management, it’s easy to implement these changes and communicate them with your team members.

Wrike’s risk management features are easy to use, and we don’t compromise on security, scalability, or the quality of the data-driven insights our tools can offer. Whether your goal is to forecast risk, ensure compliance, or keep your project data secure, Wrike has you covered. 

To see how this plays out — for all our Business, Enterprise, and Pinnacle users — let’s look at the key features in a little more detail. 

Timely risk prediction 

Wrike’s risk management software gives you the alerts you need, before the emerging issues derail your project. 

Imagine you’re the head of a team leading a new product launch. You have a dashboard set up to monitor the project, and you receive weekly, automatically generated reports from Wrike on the project status. When you consult the latest report, you notice that key development tasks have overrun, and the delay is set to impact the design team working further down the project timeline and the ultimate launch date. When you dive into Wrike, you can quickly find the source of the issue (for example, the development team’s task volume pushed them over capacity for a short time), and make informed decisions about reallocating and rescheduling your project tasks. Features like capacity monitoring keep your plans achievable, and dynamic task dependencies update resources like your team’s Gantt chart timeline automatically.And, when your mitigation plan is finalized, Wrike’s automated notifications alert the team members instantly, helping them prioritize the new tasks. 

Cross-team alignment

Wrike’s project spaces are built around dashboards customized to the needs of your project team — however many departments or external stakeholders are involved. 

Wrike gives every team member a live overview of your project progress and potential risks, and this central source of truth keeps you on the same page throughout your project. Then, if you want to monitor sensitive project metrics, it’s as simple as creating a private project management dashboard to display that risk information for managers only. Wrike includes even more features to help large organizations optimize their complex project management. Cross-tagging, for example, is an innovative tool that lets one project task exist in multiple spaces, dashboards, and folders. 

This reduces confusion and versioning issues when different departments collaborate. Plus, cross-tagging is an easy way to visualize the connected risks that can impact your wider company when a project goes over time or over budget. 

Automation for quick adjustments

With Wrike, you can use intuitive when/then automation rules and our ground-breaking Work Intelligence AI to enhance your risk mitigation strategy. 

From automatically delegating new tasks to the teams that have the capacity to complete them in time, to automating your risk reporting before your daily standups, Wrike takes the manual tasks out of risk management. This reduces errors in the data you rely on, and frees you up to focus on managing your team.

These risk management automations bring transparency to your projects and set clear expectations as you move to get your project out of high-risk situations. Whenever there’s a change to your project tasks, your teams will be notified and your dashboards updated. And because the entire task history is recorded in Wrike, it’s clear who they should turn to if they have questions or feedback about the adjusted plan.  

Easy adoption and integration 

Wrike offers enterprise-grade risk management features to handle the most complex, interconnected projects. The best part is how easy the transition to Wrike can be. You can access all these risk management features after a smooth onboarding process, which includes: 

• Imports of your ongoing project files from spreadsheets and platforms like Microsoft Project 
• Integrations with your existing tools for continuity in your business processes
• Templates for project spaces and dashboards to give you access to the essential features fast 
• Risk management blueprints, including the Project Risk Analysis template to organize, categorize, and manage risks
• Support from Wrike’s customer service team 

Wrike is also committed to providing the highest levels of data security. 

For more information on our security policies, see the security overview, or contact our customer service department for more information about your specific regulatory needs.