The risk register
Where accepted risks live once a human has agreed they are real.
Premortem is not primarily a register — it is what fills one. But a risk nobody can find later is a risk nobody acts on, so accepted risks get written somewhere durable.
The flow
Propose → decide → commit. Nothing is written until the third step.
- The assessment proposes risks in the panel. They exist only there
- A person marks each accepted, mitigating, or dismissed
- Commit accepted writes them out
Two checkboxes control where:
- to the issue description — a “Risks (Premortem)” section, so anyone reading the ticket sees them without opening anything
- to the project’s Confluence register — the cross-project view
Use both. They answer different questions: the description answers “what should I worry about in this ticket”, the register answers “what are we carrying across the project”.
Setting up the Confluence side
⚙ → Apps → Premortem settings → Confluence space(s) for the risk register.
MFS— every Jira project writes into that one spaceBT:MFS, PAY:FIN— per-project mapping, comma or newline separated. An entry with no colon is the fallback for any project not listed
Premortem creates a page called Risk register BT (the project key) in the mapped space if it does not exist yet.
What a row contains
| Column | |
|---|---|
| Task | linked back to the Jira issue |
| Risk | what could go wrong |
| Category | security, data integrity, operational, and so on |
| Likelihood × Impact | the assessment’s rating, derived from the risk’s occurrence and severity |
| Mitigation (prevent) | what stops it happening |
| If it happens | what to do when it happens anyway |
| Trigger | the signal that says it is happening now |
| Status | proposed, accepted, mitigating, dismissed |
The last three columns are the ones that make a register usable in an incident rather than only in a planning meeting.
Re-committing is safe
Rows for an issue are replaced, not appended. Commit the same issue five times and the register holds one current set, not five copies. The same is true of the description section — it is rewritten in place, not stacked.
Keeping it from rotting
A register nobody trims stops being read, and then stops being written.
⚙ → Apps → Premortem settings → Register maintenance scans every page
titled Risk register * across the site, removes rows whose Jira issue no
longer exists, and saves a page only when something actually changed.
It also runs on a schedule, so in practice you rarely need the button. It is there for when you have just deleted a batch of issues and want the register correct now rather than tomorrow.