Writing a risk assessment is mostly a discipline problem rather than a knowledge problem. The people who find it hard are usually trying to assess a department rather than an activity, and are trying to describe what should happen rather than what does. This page is the practical order: what to pick, what to walk, what to write in each column, and the two habits that separate an assessment somebody can act on from a document that gets filed and forgotten.
Pick one activity, not a place and not a department
Assess the changing of the blade, the delivery unloading, the work at the mezzanine edge. An assessment scoped to a department produces a document too general to brief from and too long to revise, and it goes out of date in one place while staying right in five others. Activity-scoped assessments are shorter, they can be handed to the person doing that job, and when the method changes you revise one page rather than reopening a project.
Walk it before you write it
Go and watch the task, or at minimum talk it through with the person who does it, step by step, and write the steps down first. Hazards attach themselves to steps far more reliably than they come to mind in an office. This is also where you find the difference between the method as described and the method as performed, and the second one is what your assessment has to be about.
Write what you already do, honestly, before what you will do
The existing-controls column is the one people inflate, and inflating it is the single most damaging habit in this work: it makes the assessment read well and hides the gap. If the guard is sometimes removed, say so. If the training happened once, three years ago, say that. The further-action column then has something real to fix, and the document becomes a plan rather than a claim.
Every further action gets a name and a date, or it is a wish
An action with no owner does not happen, and an action with no date happens after the incident. Naming a person and a date turns the assessment into something reviewable: at the next review you can see what was done and what was not, which is the only way the set improves. Finish by signing and dating it and putting the review date on it, because an assessment with no review date is one nobody will notice has aged.
Questions people ask about how to write a risk assessment
How many steps are in the risk assessment process?
Five, in the regulator's framing: identify hazards, assess the risks, control the risks, record your findings, review the controls. Other material describes the same work in six or seven steps by splitting one of them; the count is a teaching device and the duty is to assess suitably and sufficiently.
What are the stages of a risk assessment in practice?
Scope one activity, walk it and write the steps, identify what could go wrong at each and to whom, record what you already do, decide what more is needed and who owns it, then sign, date and set a review. The order matters because walking before writing is what makes the rest specific.
How long should a risk assessment be?
As long as the activity needs. A two-page assessment for a well-controlled task with three hazards is a good assessment; a twelve-page one covering a department is usually a worse one. Length is a poor proxy for quality and a good proxy for how likely the document is to be read.