A RAID Log People Actually Use
A risk register that nobody reads is not a control. It is a document that makes everybody feel a control exists.
RAID stands for risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies, and most implementations of it are theatre. The register is populated in mobilisation, reviewed once, and produced at the end as evidence that risk was managed. Nothing in it changed a decision.
An owner is a person, not a workstream
A risk owned by "the delivery team" is owned by nobody. The single strongest predictor of a register being used is that every live entry has a named person and a review date, and that both are visible to whoever runs the weekly meeting.
Assumptions are the half everybody drops
Firms track risks and issues and quietly ignore assumptions, which is backwards: an assumption is a risk somebody has already decided not to test. Writing it down with a date to test it by is the cheapest control in the whole discipline.
The good ones are specific and falsifiable. "Client data is good enough" is not an assumption, it is a hope. "Client data is complete enough to answer the question, tested on a sample in week one" is one you can actually resolve.
The register has to reach the status report
Risks that never leave the register do not change anything. The weekly report should select its key risks from the live register rather than restating them, so the report and the register cannot disagree and the register earns a reason to be current.
Escalation before it is needed
Agree the escalation ladder at mobilisation, when nobody is defensive. Who hears about a risk at each severity, how quickly, and who can decide. An escalation path invented during an incident is negotiated rather than followed.
Starting from something rather than nothing
Atlas seeds a RAID register from the playbook an engagement starts from, so a technology implementation begins with the risks technology implementations actually have rather than an empty table. Those starters are a prompt rather than a substitute: the ones that matter on this engagement get added by the people doing it.