Concept: Risk Management
This is a fundamental practice that project managers want to consider in their projects. Identifying and minimizing risks early in the project lifecycle is key factor for project sucess.
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Main Description

Introduction

As life, every project contains a part of uncertainty. The role of Risk Management is to deal with this uncertainty to try to understand its potential influence on the project. Also as in life, project risks may be seen as threats or opportunities. The former means the risk should be mitigated (see risk management strategies below) where the latter means that taking a calculated risk may bring, for example, competitive advantage for a product or organization.

The project manager continuously identifies risks to the project. Each iteration provides a chance for better understanding of stakeholder needs, the team capabilities, the technology at hand, and so on. As risks arise, they are captured, quantified and prioritized. High level of magnitude risks are attacked first, thus improving the chances of project success and minimizing uncertainty.

Risk Management Strategies

The project manager will not be just identifying the risks, but he will be also defining the strategy he will be using to deal with each risk.

Project managers usually use one of these common strategies to deal with their risks:

  • Risk avoidance: reorganize the project so that it cannot be affected by that risk.
    • For example: you need to use a new framework. A risk avoidance strategy could be to drop this new framework and using another one that is well-known by the team.
  • Risk transfer: reorganize the project so that someone or something else bears the risk.
    • For example: the application you are developing need to communicate with a legacy system. Rather that taking the risk. A risk transfer strategy could be to make the legacy support team responsible of providing the APIs to access the legacy system.
  • Risk mitigation: define a mitigation plan to to reduce the probability or the impact of the risk.
    • For example: you need to use a new middleware. A risk mitigation strategy could be to build a prototype using this new middleware to validate that he will provide the features you need for your application.
  • Risk acceptance: decide to live with the risk, and define a contingency plan.
    • For example: your integrator is the only one who knows how to integrate the different components of your application. A contingency plan, could be to identify a resource on another project that you could bring on if your integrator is sick, leave the company, etc.
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