Fault Tree Analysis

(drawing via EDSoft)

You never know what will turn up when flipping over rocks! Looking for more info on Project Management by Risk, I came across a reference to Fault Tree Analysis (FTA)...basically (from what I currently understand) FTA is a graphical method of determining cause and probability of failure. The top node is the risk and then a circuit like diagram of and and or gates are developed to trace the potential root causes of the risk. There could be multiple layers of contributing factors, each with a probability of occurring. All taken together you end up with a detailed risk analysis and probability....obviously there's a organization dedicated to FTA creation (heck, even PM's have a organization or two), here's some interesting links:

• Fault-Tree Org - http://www.fault-tree.net/
• Fault Tree Analysis of Computer-Based Systems by Joanne Bechta Dugan
• Probablistic Risk Assessment Tutorial by Todd Paulos
• Wikipedia's definiation of FTA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_tree_analysis
  

Very interesting, seems to be a simple (easy to say at this point) approach to truly defining risk in a way that's easy to develop, view, share, etc. As with anything else, caution to overusing, not all risks are worth defining in detail, but those that are deserve this type of attention.