"The most common risk that I always keep my eye on is going over budget. For example, I was managing the implementation of a new service offering. The project was already pre-defined and it came with a budget breakdown and activation schedule for every sales area. These numbers were based on five-year-old census data. As soon as I saw this information, I immediately brought up the risk that these outdated numbers could pose. In my experience, census numbers have always been lower than actual. This could mean that if we actually had more prospective customers than expected, we would need to hire, train and manage more salespeople, produce more marketing and sales collaterals, among other things. Fortunately, we had some time to run it by our CFO and we increased the budget by 20%. When we ran the numbers after the first month of sales, we found out that it would've cost us at least 50% more if we didn't plan accordingly."