A risk register is the single most underused project artefact. Most teams write one at kickoff, paste it into a deck, and never look at it again — which is exactly when the risks they catalogued start hitting them. This free risk register template is built to be opened weekly, not framed once. Every column maps to the standard PMI / PRINCE2 fields, but the interaction is built for actual humans: edit any cell inline, change probability or impact with a dropdown, add or delete rows in one click, export the whole thing to CSV for your wiki or a board pack.
The seeded example shows the four risk categories most software and operations projects hit — dependency slippage, key-person dependency, scope creep, and a regulatory or compliance change. You replace the example rows with your own. The point of seeding is so you don't start at a blank table and freeze. Look at the example, see the shape, write your version.
The columns are deliberately chosen to force good thinking instead of theatre:
- ID — every risk gets a stable handle so you can reference it in standups and status reports.
- Risk — describe what could go wrong in one plain sentence. If you can't, you don't understand the risk yet.
- Category — bucket it (Technical, People, Process, External, Financial). Helps spot clusters.
- Probability and Impact — Low / Medium / High. We deliberately don't use 1–5 numeric scoring; false precision is worse than rough buckets, and arguing about whether something is a 3 or a 4 wastes meeting time.
- Owner — exactly one name. "The team" is not an owner.
- Mitigation — what you're doing *now* to reduce probability or impact. Not "monitor closely" — that's wishful thinking, not a mitigation.
- Contingency — what you do *if* it happens. Pre-deciding this means you don't panic.
- Status — Open, Watching, Triggered, Closed. The lifecycle.
The whole thing lives in your browser via localStorage — close the tab, come back next week, your register is still there. Export to CSV when you need to share it. Embed the live tool in your project wiki via /embed/tools/risk-register-template. If you want this connected to your actual tasks (so a triggered risk auto-creates a triage task with the owner already assigned), that's what LemTask does — but for a standalone register, this is enough.