You have a vested interest in ensuring your project is successful and delivers value to the enterprise. You may have responsibility for the millions of dollars invested in your portfolio or in your strategic initiatives. And you don’t want to be surprised.

With so much on the line:  

• Do you know the top 5 issues your project managers are struggling with that could take your portfolio off the rails?  
• Do you know the top risks your portfolio faces, and the plan to mitigate them?  
• Do you know the key decisions being made that affect portfolio success, and do you agree with how they are being handled?  

With RAIDLOG, you get instant visibility into key Issues, Risks and Decisions that shape the outcome of your portfolio. Take the surprises out of your portfolio with RAIDLOG.  

RAID logs were actually invented to help Commercial Managers and CFO’s. 

When negotiating a contract in a project, weeks or months of work can go into carefully negotiating the terms and conditions, and aligning expectations. But when that’s all done, it’s handed over to a completely different team (the project team) who likely has no insight into any of that background. How do you make sure the project team is aligned with the assumptions, constraints and dependencies captured in the contract? How do you ensure they stay mindful of the risks and expectations of each party? It’s not so easy for them to pull that out of dozens (or hundreds?) of pages of contract.  

That is why RAID logs were invented. They were developed to capture the key constraints, assumptions and risks in a contract and ensure they are transitioned to the project team for management throughout project delivery.  

How important is it that your key initiatives succeed?  

A Mickinsey study found that 17% of large IT initiatives go so poorly that they threaten the very existence of the organization^*. Nobody wants to see their career go that way, so don’t take chances when it comes to managing Risks and Issues in your key initiatives. 

And the ROI is easy. Multiple studies find that investing in risk and issue management has a return of 20:1**.  

(*) Bloch, M., Blumberg, S., & Laartz, J. (2012, October 1). Delivering large-scale IT projects on time, on budget, and on value. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/delivering-large-scale-it-projects-on-time-on-budget-and-on-value 

(**) Hall, E. M. (1999). Risk management return on investment. Systems Engineering, 2(3), 177-180. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1520-6858(1999)2:3<177::AID-SYS5>3.0.CO;2-6 

A RAID log is a tool that helps PMs: Identify, respond to and manage Risk. Track and stay on top of Action Items – especially the hundreds of things that need to get done which don’t belong in a project schedule or backlog. Quickly get on top of and resolve project Issues. Help PM’s get Decisions made right and by the right people – and to implement those decisions and make them stick 

And they help manage project Changes, identify Lessons Learned and manage Dependencies 

A Risk register is for identifying and planning responses to Risks.

A RAID log includes your Risk register, but also your Actions, Issues, Decisions, Changes and Lessons Learned. It is not your project plan, but it is all the things you need to help run your project plan. It can help you keep your project on track, and course-correct when things go wrong.  

In the old days, we used to all use spreadsheets. But thankfully, technology has caught up. Using our app allows you to aggregate, collaborate, and integrate your RAID log. What’s more, we are now incorporating AI to supercharge your project management.  

You can stick with your spreadsheet, but that… 

• Doesn’t let your team aggregate logs across projects for a portfolio view 

• Don’t integrate into your reporting or PPM tools 

• Don’t easily let you control sharing and version control 

• Don’t let you easily relate objects. For example, when you have an Issue, they don’t let you easily create related action items that you can easily track individually 

Don’t let you use more graphic interfaces like Kanban or collaborate in-context as easily. 

People try (including us before we started RAIDLOG) but it never works out.  

• Your collaborators are limited by your licensing  

• Trello won’t even give you a Grid / Table view for free 

• You can’t control permissions on individual items 

• There’s no reporting across boards in many of these tools 

• You could maybe hack something together, but that takes a lot of time and these tools have a lot of limits. Is that worth your time? 

Specific to Smartsheets – our very first consulting partner was a Smartsheet partner! They said that while you can cobble something together, it really isn’t very good at RAID logs.  

Plus, you miss out on all our RAID specific functionality like heat maps, our RAID specific AI and more. Try it out for yourself and see the difference! 

Absolutely! We launched day 1 with an API that allows you to integrate with all your other PM and reporting tools. We also have an integration service which makes it super easy to link RAIDLOG to your other systems.  

Yes! Because nobody wants to repeat the same issue over and over. Lessons Learned are available throughout the project do the team can easily capture what is working and what isn’t. What’s more, later this year we will release an AI that securely recommends to you lessons learned based on your past projects. 

Much more secure than a bunch of spreadsheets. Our platform securely encrypts your data at rest and in transport, and is hosted in Google Cloud Services, one of the most secure cloud services available.  

For more information, see our safety and security page. 

Would you rather start by cutting down on the number of spreadsheets floating around there?  

It’s understandable to minimize the number of tools. But it makes even more sense to use the right tool for the job, especially when that job is to keep your critical projects from failing, and ensuring you get return on your project investment. Investing in risk management tools like ours has shown to have an ROI of 20:1^** , so it may be worth bringing on another SaaS app.  

What’s more, with our embedded view, the user experience isn’t any more complicated for your users – we simply embed RAIDLOG in your existing tools for easy access.  

(**)Hall, E. M. (1999). Risk management return on investment. Systems Engineering, 2(3), 177-180. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1520-6858(1999)2:3<177::AID-SYS5>3.0.CO;2-6 

We’re here to support you every step of the way as you get started. Please, submit the demo request form below and a team member will contact you within 24 business hours.