In a failure mode and effects analysis for the EPD Pilot, which attributes are typically assessed to determine risk priority?

• A. Severity, probability, and detectability.
• B. Color, texture, and weight.
• C. Budget, schedule, and scope.
• D. User satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty.

Answer: (A)

In FMEA, risk priority comes from assessing three key factors that describe how bad a failure could be, how likely it is, and how well current controls would catch it. Those factors are severity, probability (often called occurrence), and detectability (how easily a failure is detected before reaching the customer). Severity looks at the impact if the failure happens—on safety, performance, or user experience. Probability gauges how likely the failure is to occur during operation. Detectability evaluates the chance that existing controls will notice the failure in time to prevent or mitigate it. By evaluating these together, you can prioritize which failures to address first, typically by combining them into a risk priority metric.

The other options don’t fit this purpose: color, texture, and weight are product characteristics rather than risk-priority factors in FMEA; budget, schedule, and scope relate to project management constraints rather than failure-mode risk; and user satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty are outcome measures of product use, not the risk-priority attributes used to rank failure modes.