If you’re aiming for the ‘stars’ with your product development, then effective risk management can make the difference between success and failure. This is brought home even more strongly in today’s environment where the marketplace is demanding shorter and shorter development cycles. The reduction in cycle time is effected through new and enhanced technology and the concurrent engineering approach to development. These techniques and technologies cannot eliminate risk from your project, in fact they will often exacerbate the impact of risk. In addition to the time pressures, we are also seeing increasing cost constraints on development teams which dictate that any non-value adding activities will be dropped. Formal risk management is essential in effective project management, but must be accomplished efficiently with a focus on areas that provide the biggest ‘bang for buck’. This paper provides some background on risk management and presents some simple and practical guidelines in regular use in product development projects at Invetech.