{"id":832,"date":"2015-09-09T17:59:36","date_gmt":"2015-09-10T00:59:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.plm.automation.siemens.com\/t5\/Polarion-Blog\/Morris-Medical-Monthly-How-to-use-RiskPack-Part-3-of-4\/ba-p\/380963"},"modified":"2026-03-26T05:31:43","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T09:31:43","slug":"morris-medical-monthly-how-to-use-riskpack-part-3-of-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/morris-medical-monthly-how-to-use-riskpack-part-3-of-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Morris Medical Monthly: How to use RiskPack (Part 3 of 4)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome back to Morris Medical Monthly: a monthly series for medical device development companies (and companies who are related to such companies), providing some useful information about&nbsp;<A href=\"http:\/\/www.polarion.com\/products\/index.php\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">Polarion solutions<\/A>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<A href=\"http:\/\/extensions.polarion.com\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">Polarion extensions<\/A>.<\/p>\n<p>Today we will start on the subject of Polarion&#8217;s&nbsp;<A href=\"http:\/\/extensions.polarion.com\/extensions\/184-polarion-alm-riskpack-iso-14971\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">RiskPack extension<\/A>, and have a look into RiskPack&#8217;s <EM>Basics<\/EM>.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\n<H1>Risk analysis: Identify sequences of events<\/H1><br \/>\nAfter the first collection of ideas described in the previous section, you need to define complete sequences of<br \/>\nevents. You need to create a new sequence of events work item for each sequence of events, and the &#8211; according to<br \/>\nyour data model &#8211; link the data entered in the previous step with the roles starts with, contains and ends with. In any<br \/>\ncase, a harm should be the end of the sequence of events and of course, one sequence of events can lead to<br \/>\nmultiple harms or can have multiple starting points.<\/p>\n<p>After that, you have defined a complete and detailed description of how your device can lead to a harm. The<br \/>\nSequences Of Events Table helps you to keep control over your data.<br \/>\n<H1><A href=\"http:\/\/www.polarion.com\/resources\/download.php?dl=Polarion-Risk-Analysis-As-A-First-Class-Citizen.pdf&amp;utm_source=morrismedicalriskpack&amp;utm_medium=web&amp;utm_campaign=blog\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\"><IMG class=\"alignright  wp-image-4412\" src=\"http:\/\/community.plm.automation.siemens.com\/legacyfs\/online\/siemensplm_blogs\/2013\/11\/polarion-risk-what-risk.jpg\" alt=\"Mountain goats: Risk? What Risk?\" width=\"288\" height=\"216\" \/><\/A>Risk analysis: Identify risks<\/H1><br \/>\nUp to this point, you only modeled how your device can lead to a harm, but not how likely that is. That&#8217;s exactly<br \/>\nwhat you need the work item type &#8220;Risk&#8221; for. Create a new Risk work item and link the sequence of events it considers<br \/>\nvia the link role &#8220;considers&#8221; with the sequence of events. After that, set the &#8220;risk probability&#8221; attribute of the risk to the<br \/>\ncorrect value according to your analysis. Every such Risk entry will produce a line in the Risk Table and an entry in<br \/>\nthe Risk Control Matrix. Depending on your risk policy settings, the RiskPack can automatically identify whether the risk is acceptable or not.<br \/>\n<H2>How a risk can be linked to harms and sequences of events<\/H2><br \/>\nEvery risk needs an information on the severity of harm it considers. As the severity of harm is an attribute of a harm<br \/>\nwork item, every Risk type work item somehow needs to be linked to a Harm type work item. There are multiple ways this can<br \/>\nbe achieved.<br \/>\n<H2>A harm is linked via a sequence of events<\/H2><br \/>\nIn the example above, a risk is linked to a sequence of events (via &#8220;considers&#8221;) and that sequence of events end<br \/>\nwith a harm. Therefore, it is clear which harm is considered by the risk. If only a sequence of events is linked to a<br \/>\nrisk, the severity of the harm linked with that sequence of events is taken for risk consideration.<br \/>\n<H2>Multiple harms are linked via a sequence of events<\/H2><br \/>\nIf multiple harms are linked, the RiskPack takes the most severe severity for estimation of the risk.<br \/>\n<H2>A harm is directly linked to the risk<\/H2><br \/>\nSometimes, one sequence of events can lead to different harms in the same way, but the harms have different<br \/>\nprobabilities of occurrence. For example, a sequence of events can lead to death with a significant lower probability<br \/>\nthan to skin burn. In risk management, that leads to two risks: death (high severity, low probability) and skin burn<br \/>\n(medium severity, high probability). In the RiskPack, you will model this by creating two risk entries, both linking to<br \/>\nthe same sequence of events, but one also linking to death and the other one linking to the sequence of events and<br \/>\nthe harm &#8220;skin burn&#8221;. If a Harm work item is directly linked to a Risk work item, the severity of that directly<br \/>\nlinked Risk is taken for risk estimation. In the end, you will have two rows in your Risk Table and two entries in<br \/>\nyour risk matrix, with possible different acceptance levels.<br \/>\n<H2>Multiple sequences of events are linked<\/H2><br \/>\nOne Risk can be linked to any number of sequences of events. There will always be only one entry in the Risk Table<br \/>\nand the Risk Matrix. Doing this can be useful if the same risk control measure can be used to reduce the probability<br \/>\nof occurrence of all the sequences of events considered.<br \/>\n<H2>Sequences of events that are absolutely impossible to ever take place<\/H2><br \/>\nIf you have identified and documented a sequences of events in an early stage of risk analysis and later you find out<br \/>\nthat this sequence of events absolutely cannot take place, there is a special attribute you can use for this. You<br \/>\ncan still create a Risk work item and link it to the sequence of events, but you set the &#8220;risk type&#8221; to &#8220;impossible risk&#8221;<br \/>\nand leave the probability value unset. This will lead to an entry in the Risk Table for documentation, but not to any<br \/>\nentry in the Risk Matrix.<br \/>\n<H2>Sequences of events that only take place after application of a risk control measure<\/H2><br \/>\nSometimes, a risk control measure can lead to a new sequence of events that was not possible before application of<br \/>\nthe risk control measure. Such sequences of events can be entered just like any other and can be estimated by<br \/>\nusing a risk work item just like described above. But there is one difference in that case: Such risks should not be<br \/>\nshown in the &#8220;Risk Matrix before mitigation&#8221;. You can use the &#8220;risk type&#8221; attribute to tell the RiskPack that this is an<br \/>\n&#8220;Introduced Risk&#8221;, meaning, it was not present before application of risk control measure. It will not show up in the<br \/>\n&#8220;Matrix before mitigation&#8221; then.<\/p>\n<p>For more information about Polarion&#8217;s RiskPack visit our Extension Portal using following link:<\/p>\n<p><A href=\"http:\/\/extensions.polarion.com\/extensions\/184-polarion-alm-riskpack-iso-14971\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">http:\/\/extensions.polarion.com\/extensions\/184-polarion-alm-riskpack-iso-14971<\/A>.<\/p>\n<p>I hope you liked this article and you will visit our Blog again when there is another&nbsp;<B>Morris Medical Monthly&nbsp;<\/B>article.<\/p>\n<p><HR \/><\/p>\n<p><A href=\"http:\/\/www.polarion.com\/resources\/download.php?dl=Polarion-Risk-Analysis-As-A-First-Class-Citizen.pdf&amp;utm_source=morrismedicalriskpack&amp;utm_medium=web&amp;utm_campaign=blog\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\"><IMG class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-4415 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/community.plm.automation.siemens.com\/legacyfs\/online\/siemensplm_blogs\/2013\/11\/polarion-free-risk-analysis-eguide.jpg\" alt=\"Banner: Download Free eGuide\" width=\"640\" height=\"130\" \/><\/A><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome back to Morris Medical Monthly: a monthly series for medical device development companies (and companies who are related to such companies), providing some useful information about&nbsp;Polar&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63333,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spanish_translation":"","french_translation":"","german_translation":"","italian_translation":"","polish_translation":"","japanese_translation":"","chinese_translation":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"industry":[],"product":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63333"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=832"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":833,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832\/revisions\/833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=832"},{"taxonomy":"industry","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/industry?post=832"},{"taxonomy":"product","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product?post=832"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/polarion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}