RAID plus log

Before writing this I double-check and am surprised to find a mild controversy as to what the acronym RAID, as in the well-know project management tool RAID Log, actually stands for.

I read “RAID generally stands for Risks, Assumptions, Issues, and Dependencies. Some project managers use it to stand for Risks, Actions, Issues, and Decisions.” _[1] I was certainly more familiar with the second. It’s a nice example of a kind of metanalysis, which is when the structure or meaning of a word changes – like it’s reinterpreted. Interesting. Of course there are other RAIDs out there, such as the Redundant Array of Independent Disks but these are completely different to what we’re talking about here.

Whichever variant you favour, RAID is a nice, simple tool for essentially listing and categorising different kinds of knowledge items or signals in your project. This then allows you either to simply keep the whole list in full view so you can check the progress of each and all items, or else you can add further metadata to analyse, sort, filter, group and prioritise items, or add notes to them. The most important part is that it allows you to keep track of the elements of project complexity in an externalised way such that you’re not relying on memory and can also share it with a team. Sounds a bit like KM?

If we’re keeping track of all the different knowledge types and signals that come up in a project then, I would suggest, there could be other categories that we might consider adding to give us a RAID+ Log that even more fully reflected the KM perspective. For example:

• Questions – keep track of unknown information that you prioritise to answer, or not
• Ideas and alternatives – new possibilities not yet incorporated into the project plan for further consideration

… and I’m sure you can think of more useful categories.

_{[1] https://miro.com/templates/raid-log/ accessed 10 March 2022}