It's an interesting thing that we've noticed in some organisations... There's a tendency to treat Risks, Issues Opportunities, Benefits and Deliverables in isolation from eachother. And that's even when most PMs should be able to identify that Risks that occur (are realised) are Issues that need to be resolved.

It is not unheard of for organisations to categorise the type of risk, issue, benefit, opportunity and deliverable in different ways. In other words the meta-data describing these things is not consistent.

One way to avoid this is to adopt a structured approach to modeling the world around us and then sticking to that model across all the different areas of interest in the project.

At engagedprojects we have adopted a simple assessment that some others also use... It has been improved from the PEST analysis (Political, Economic, Social and Technical) - we prefer to use the STEEPLES model which expands the vectors to:

• Sociological / social pressures & trends
• Technological
• Environmental / ecological
• Economic
• Political
• Legal
• Ethical
• Sustainability

What we definitely do is to apply these to our thinking and modeling across and through projects. We'd recommend using this approach and would be delighted to assist your organisation in applying the approach to help standardise project thinking and business outcomes.