FMEA is a preventive quality tool which is very popular for risk analysis. Many standards/ procedures have been developed describing FMEA. The applicability of FMEA has a wide range including industrial and business processes. A complete overview of different types of FMEA and their applicability for different purposes will be given in this paper. Besides the failure mode and effect analysis, a criticality analysis is usually an integral part of FMEA projects. Risks can be determined either qualitatively or quantitatively in various ways. Depending on the project phase and the objective, different/ consecutive ways of determining a value of risk can make sense. An overview of various known, and some improved methods for carrying out a risk assessment will be given in this paper. These methods will be compared by different criteria e.g. reliability, simplicity for application.