Risk management is important for any successful organization, but starting a risk assessment project from scratch can be a time-sink.
Luckily, free risk assessment templates for Excel can save the day.
Whether you’re juggling projects, safety assessments, or big decisions, these templates make it easy to organize, prioritize, and tackle any risk assessment process without too much effort.
Let’s explore the best risk assessment templates for Excel to speed up your process.
Free Risk Assessment Templates for Excel
- What Makes a Good Risk Assessment Excel Template?
- Risk Assessment Excel Templates
- Limitations of Using Excel for Risk Assessment
- Alternative Risk Assessment Excel Templates
- 1. ClickUp Risk Assessment Whiteboard Template
- 2. ClickUp Risk Analysis Whiteboard Template
- 3. ClickUp Risk Management Template
- 4. ClickUp Risk Benefit Analysis Template
- 5. ClickUp Project Management Risk Analysis Template
- 6. ClickUp Value Risk Matrix Template
- 7. ClickUp Assumption Grid Template
- 8. ClickUp Risk Register Template
- 9. ClickUp Pi Planning Template
- 10. ClickUp Job Safety Analysis Template
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Makes a Good Risk Assessment Excel Template?
A basic risk assessment template in Excel should have key characteristics to help you build solid risk mitigation strategies. Here’s what to look for:
- Clear risk depiction: Clearly define each potential risk
- Risk prioritization: Include a standardized scoring system to assess the likelihood and impact of each risk
- Customizable actions tab: Provide space to outline necessary actions for mitigating risks
- Ownership assignment: Offer a section to assign responsibility for managing each risk
- Deadline tracking: Enable setting and tracking of deadlines with timely reminders
- Flexibility: Ensure the template is easy to update as risks resolve or change
- Visualization: Incorporate dashboards, charts, and lists for a clear overview of risks and priorities
Summarize this article for me pleaseRisk Assessment Excel Templates
Basic risk assessment templates are readily available online, but finding the right one that truly meets your needs can be challenging. To lift this burden off your shoulders, check out our carefully selected list of free risk assessment templates that will help you find the best of the bunch:
1. Risk Register Template by ProjectManager
The Risk Register Template by ProjectManager helps you monitor and manage project risks effortlessly. You can log risks, assign owners, and track their status.
It also allows you to categorize risks by severity and probability, helping you prioritize issues and take proactive control measures together. You can add, remove, or modify fields directly in the Excel sheet, allowing you to update the table as risks evolve.
However, the lack of built-in automation can make managing large volumes of risks time-consuming. Additionally, there’s no native way to set alerts or reminders. Still, it’s easy to share and collaborate with your team.
Ideal For: Project managers looking to systematically identify, monitor, and respond to potential risks throughout a project lifecycle.
âš¡ Template Archive: Explore free risk register templates to efficiently track, prioritize, and manage risks across all your projects.
2. Risk Matrix Template by ProjectManager
The Risk Matrix Template by ProjectManager is ideal for a visual overview of potential risks. It’s a grid with two axes—likelihood and severity—that helps you identify which risks need more attention.
The left side displays likelihood from rare to almost certain, while the top shows severity from insignificant to severe. The color-coded matrix helps prioritize risks quickly, focusing on high-risk areas in red and moderate ones in yellow.
However, this Risk Matrix Template can oversimplify complex risks. It provides limited detail beyond risk priority and probability. It also lacks real-time updates and automation, so you must manually remove the resolved risks.
Ideal For: Project managers and teams who need a structured, visual tool to assess and prioritize project risks effectively.
3. IT Risk Assessment Template by ProjectManager
ProjectManager’s IT Risk Assessment Template may not win points for style, but it excels in assessing substance. It offers numerous fields to assess every potential risk within your IT environment thoroughly.
The template’s comprehensive approach equips IT teams to preemptively tackle cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities. Implementing a solid cybersecurity risk management framework becomes easier with this detailed, context-heavy structure.
The template allows tracking of various issues, from system failures to data breaches, and includes detailed sections for risk description, impact, and mitigation strategies.
It features built-in Excel formulas to calculate the potential impact of risks, which helps in creating a strong contingency plan for crisis management. However, it needs more automation and collaboration features, making it less practical for larger teams. Unfortunately, it’s a static document, so real-time updates aren’t possible.
Ideal For: IT managers, chief technology officers, risk officers, and project managers responsible for identifying, managing, and mitigating risks in IT projects.
4. Risk Assessment Matrix Template by TeamGantt
The Risk Assessment Matrix Template by TeamGantt is a visual risk assessment tool that categorizes your risks based on scales of severity and likelihood.
The matrix is divided into risk likelihood and risk severity. Both sides have 3 levels.
For likelihood, it’s broken into ‘Not Likely’, ‘Moderately Likely’, and ‘Highly Likely.’ For severity, you have ‘Acceptable’, ‘Tolerable’, and ‘Generally Unacceptable’. By dividing your risks into these intersecting categories, you can better understand what to tackle first and what can be ignored for now.
The template’s simplicity limits its ability to capture complex, evolving risks. Without automated tracking, real-time risk management is harder, and customization options are limited.
Ideal For: Project managers across industries who need a streamlined, visual tool to assess and prioritize project risks.
5. Risk Register Template by HubSpot
The Risk Register Template by Hubspot helps assess risks by simply dividing the space into major sections and then subsections, thus improving readability.
It has an intuitive and user-friendly format, making it easy to log risks, categorize them, assign owners, and track status. It also includes sections for risk mitigation strategies and plans, helping you proactively address potential issues.
Since this is an Excel template, collaboration is limited to what Excel offers through OneDrive, which is functional but not ideal. This template is also static, so real-time updates aren’t available—you’ll need to make manual changes.
Ideal For: Project managers, business analysts, and operations teams looking to document and mitigate risks.
6. Risk Analysis Template by You Exec
The Risk Analysis Template by You Exec is a 3 by 4 visual matrix that performs a similar task as the other pure prioritization templates on the list.
The template improves on standard risk levels by adding a ‘very high’ category, complete with its own color coding for easier risk identification.
When you download the template, you get a helpful YouTube tutorial video to show you the ropes. The model includes tools like RACI, Triage, Gantt charts, and Kanban boards, providing a well-rounded approach to risk management.
Ideal For: Project managers, business analysts, and stakeholders who need a structured approach to identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks within project plans.
Summarize this article for me pleaseLimitations of Using Excel for Risk Assessment
When it comes to risk assessment processes, Excel has long been a go-to tool for many businesses.
Although it seems like a simple and familiar solution, relying on just Excel has limitations that impact the quality and efficiency of risk analysis.
1. Lack of scalability
Risk assessments often involve large datasets, especially in industries like finance, insurance, or supply chain management. As the data volume grows, spreadsheets become difficult to manage.
The software slows down, formulas take longer to compute, and even basic tasks like scrolling through rows become challenging. Spreadsheets aren’t designed to handle the large datasets required for thorough risk analysis, creating bottlenecks in processing.
2. Error-prone manual input
It’s human nature to make mistakes; even the smallest typo or formula error can lead to inaccurate risk assessments.
You might not notice a misplaced decimal or wrong reference cell until too late, leading to huge repercussions. This, in turn, eats up your valuable time and significantly increases the risk of human error.
3. Lack of proper collaboration features
Multiple stakeholders often need to weigh in on risk assessments, but traditional spreadsheets don’t support collaboration well. Sharing a file via email or cloud services leads to version control issues.
Teams work on different versions or overwrite each other’s changes, causing confusion and risking data integrity. This becomes especially problematic when various departments require input, each contributing its own data, perspectives, and risk factors
4. Insufficient transparency
Complex formulas and calculations can easily be buried in cells. This makes it difficult for someone else to understand how a particular risk score was calculated.
It also makes it harder to see why certain assumptions were made. This lack of transparency becomes a problem for auditing or when trying to trace back decisions.
5. No instant data updating
Spreadsheets aren’t designed to provide dynamic, real-time updates. Risk is not a static concept; factors change daily or even hourly, depending on the industry.
With Excel or similar software, you need to manually update data and re-run calculations, which delays quick decision-making. Automation in traditional spreadsheets is clunky at best, meaning that businesses miss out on real-time insights.
Summarize this article for me pleaseAlternative Risk Assessment Excel Templates
Limitations shouldn’t slow you down.
That’s why we’ve compiled a list of advanced and basic risk assessment templates within the ClickUp ecosystem. ClickUp is an everything-for-work app that doubles as powerful risk management software.
With its fantastic library of templates, ClickUp makes the risk management process 100X easier. Let’s explore them together.
1. ClickUp Risk Assessment Whiteboard Template
Do you want a huge shared space that visually lists every potential risk in order of likelihood and any other parameter you choose? Then, the ClickUp Risk Assessment Whiteboard Template is your perfect match.
It’s a dynamic tool that enhances your risk management strategy across your organization’s projects and operations. It offers a freely editable, interactive, and unified platform that enables your teams to identify potential risks, assess them, and address potential threats.
The whiteboard layout makes it easy for your team to brainstorm and document vulnerabilities together. It’s a shared space where everyone stays on the same page about the key risks your business is facing.
One of its key features is the ability to categorize and rank risks based on their potential impact with customizable color coding.
Ideal For: Project managers and team leads who need a collaborative platform to visually manage and prioritize risks across various projects.
2. ClickUp Risk Analysis Whiteboard Template
If you want to take your visual templates to the next level, the ClickUp Risk Analysis Whiteboard Template is a great choice. It’s filled with colors that aren’t just for looks—you can use them to prioritize risks with greater precision.
The template uses a nuanced color system, going beyond the typical green, yellow, and red categories. The matrix displays risks with Risk Probability on one axis and Risk Severity on the other.
The color-coded background creates a gradual transition, helping you spot in-between risk levels easily. This whiteboard format encourages collaboration, letting your team freely discuss and place risks as they arise.
It helps keep the risk analysis process dynamic and organized, with everything visible to the entire team for better involvement.
Ideal For: Teams that need a highly visual, collaborative tool to actively engage in risk analysis, particularly those working on complex projects requiring nuanced risk categorization.
3. ClickUp Risk Management Template
The ClickUp Risk Management Template is the most comprehensive list-format tool for assessing risks. It provides a structured and detailed way to identify, track, and mitigate project risks.
It offers flexibility for any project, with customizable fields for risk descriptions, likelihood, impact, and mitigation plans. The template also seamlessly integrates with other project management features, such as task creation, and task tracking, enhancing collaboration.
Ideal For: Teams managing complex projects that require detailed risk tracking, accountability, and real-time progress monitoring.
💡Did you know? GRC software like ClickUp helps teams deliver services up to 64% faster with client delivery playbooks. ClickUp Templates save valuable time and improve efficiency by streamlining work organization and operations, as seen with RevPartners!
4. ClickUp Risk Benefit Analysis Template
The ClickUp Risk Benefit Analysis Template is your go-to tool for making smarter decisions. It simplifies identifying risks and evaluating project risk costs alongside benefits.
The template visually breaks down everything for easy comparison. You get a clear project evaluation, helping you see both costs and rewards. With all key details upfront, decision-making becomes quicker and more informed. This method is perfect for keeping your project on track without any guesswork.
Ideal For: Project managers, business analysts, leadership teams, cross-functional teams, and risk management professionals for evaluating risks and benefits.
Also Read: 15 Best Risk Management Software
5. ClickUp Project Management Risk Analysis Template
The ClickUp Project Management Risk Analysis Template helps teams actively identify and assess risks throughout a project’s lifecycle.
Its structured format allows for detailed logging of risks, potential impacts, financial risks, risk sources, concerned departments, mitigation strategies, and more.
The template encourages prioritization by providing fields for likelihood and severity ratings, helping you focus on the most critical risks. It also allows you to keep things within a controlled budget while following pre-defined plans and deadlines for your risk management efforts.
Ideal For: Project managers and teams handling complex, high-risk projects needing detailed risk tracking and seamless collaboration.
6. ClickUp Value Risk Matrix Template
The ClickUp Value Risk Matrix Template helps you and your team make smarter decisions by evaluating tasks based on both their potential risks and values. It’s especially effective for prioritizing work and directing resources toward tasks with the highest value and the least risk.
By visually mapping tasks on a matrix, you can quickly identify which projects should take priority.
One of the standout features of this template is its simplicity and accuracy. You can assign value and risk ratings using a scale, making it quick to plot tasks on the matrix.
With ClickUp Board view, you also get a clear visual representation of your priorities. This helps your team stay aligned and focused on tasks that drive the most impact while mitigating potential risks.
Ideal For: Project managers, product managers, and team leads who need to prioritize tasks based on value and risk.
7. ClickUp Assumption Grid Template
Struggling to decide which features to prioritize in development or which projects to tackle next? Try the ClickUp Assumption Grid Decision Matrix Template. This tool organizes your ideas based on certainty and associated risks, simplifying decision-making.
It also evaluates complex decisions by organizing pros and cons, allowing you to easily weigh your options. You can assign weights to each option based on criteria like cost, customer feedback, or risk level, helping you focus on what matters most.
Ideal For: Product managers, project managers, and business leaders who frequently face tough decisions about feature prioritization or project selection.
8. ClickUp Risk Register Template
The ClickUp Risk Register Template is excellent for keeping projects on track and managing potential risks effectively. It gives you a clear, organized way to identify, assess, and track all the possible risks that could impact your project.
You can even spot potential issues before they happen and become real problems, allowing you to stay one step ahead.
Its standardized approach to evaluating and tracking risks makes it even more useful, ensuring that everyone is on the same page. This improves communication between stakeholders and departments, so that important details are not overlooked.
Plus, it helps you plan effective strategies to mitigate risks, boosting the accuracy and efficiency of your risk management process. You can easily organize all your risk assessments in one simple format, track their status, assign ownership, and assess the potential impact—all in one place.
Ideal For: Project managers, team leads, and risk management professionals who need to track, assess, and manage risks effectively throughout a project’s lifecycle.
9. ClickUp Pi Planning Template
Planning a project sometimes feels like trying to organize a big puzzle. You’ve got all these pieces—tasks, deadlines, resources—and they must fit together just right. Traditional planning methods are a bit of a drag and often take longer than they should.
That’s where the ClickUp Pi Planning Template comes in.
This template helps you break down complex tasks into smaller, manageable parts for better clarity and resource allocation. It also provides a structured approach to project management, allowing you to track progress and identify areas that need extra attention.
Additionally, this template enhances communication with your team and stakeholders, ensuring everyone stays aligned and ready to handle changes in scope or timeline.
Ideal For: Project managers, team leads, and agile teams needing to break down complex tasks, enhance communication, and streamline resource allocation.
10. ClickUp Job Safety Analysis Template
Whether you’re dealing with heavy machinery or just managing a busy office, it’s important to find potential health and safety hazards and mitigate risks. That’s why you need the ClickUp Job Safety Analysis Template.
This template helps both employers and employees systematically identify and assess risks associated with any job.
It’s like having a risk assessment safety checklist that helps you spot potential physical or ergonomic hazards before they become real issues. You can also develop strategies to control these risks and build a safer work environment for your team.
Ideal For: Employers, safety managers, and HR teams across industries who are responsible for ensuring workplace health and safety hazards.
Summarize this article for me pleaseMitigate Risks With ClickUp’s Superior Project Management Tools
Effective risk management is key to long-term success, and while Excel templates help, a dynamic GRC software like ClickUp offers far more.
With features like enhanced collaboration, real-time updates, automation, and flexibility, ClickUp helps you easily identify, evaluate, and mitigate risks while building a foolproof risk management plan.
Want to drive growth while staying ahead of potential risks?
Then sign up to ClickUp for free now!
Everything you need to stay organized and get work done.
