A risk area is anything that we do not feel 100% comfortable providing an estimate for. Noting risk areas is essential to the success of a project. One of the biggest mistakes that we can make is not communicating about risks before or during the course of a project. There are three ways that this needs to be communicated to a client:
In real time on calls - whether it's discovery or during the course of a project, if the client provides new information or scope that you identify as a risk, call it out immediately ("We can absolutely do that for you, but I want to note that would be a risk area because it's data coming from your system that we don't have access to - we won't be able to see what that data looks like until we start working on the project which means whatever estimate we provide has the potential to be exceeded once we start working on that feature").
Meeting notes after a call - anything that you called out in a call to the client as a risk should be documented in the meeting notes and sent in basecamp.
BRD - in the "Risk Area" section, ALL risks must be documented for a project. This will also be reviewed in the internal re-estimates approval meeting.
Common risk areas:
Data - it's their data, not ours - and it will not be consistent, which will lead to issues when writing the custom business logic required for their solution
New feature specific to their business - by definition this would be something that we have never done before
Anything else we have not done before - PLEASE NOTE: there are team members with a TON of experience here; if a team member says "I've never done that before so that is a risk" - while we do want risk areas called out, this situation must be escalated directly to Chris Reddick so we can confirm nobody in Clarity has experience with whatever this is