Risk Mitigation

                              image courtesy:http://images.flatworldknowledge.com/preston/preston-fig01_008.jpg

Risk Mitigation is to pre-empt and be prepared to respond to unexpected or anticipated issues that might spring up in course of development. Risk mitigation is not about developing the solution for anticipated  issues all the time and at times, it also depends on how we would respond to an issue to reduce the impact of the same. Another perspective is to identify as to who needs to respond and how to respond in mitigating the issue.

Who should respond? The person who will be owning the Risk. This is what we classify as transfer of Risk. There are times we will not be able to respond to all the issue and we may need to direct to the right person.

Alternatively, identifying the dependencies is also another way of mitigating risks

Identifying Dependencies è Risk Transfer è Risk Mitigation

How to respond?

There are 2 types of risks we may come across

1.       Issues which we need to address with solution

2.       Issues for which we may not have solution with us

So how do we respond the above 2 scenarios.

In the first case, we have 2 options

Identify the solution è Reduce the impact (Risk still exists with less impact)

Identify the solution è Remove the impact (Risk is nullified)

In the second case

Accept the Risks è Plan for the impact

ð  Adapt the impact in the scope/plan (Plan for the Risk impact)

Avoid the Risk è Change the scope to exclude the risk

ð  Change the scope in such a way the risk is excluded

Transfer the Risk è Identify the right owner of the issue

ð  Assign the responsibility/ownership to the right person

When to respond? In general, risks and its impacts ought to be reviewed/assessed periodically with the respective mitigation plan which may necessitate changes which have to be factored and plan updated accordingly. Depending on the duration, impact also may vary.

Example, during the planning phase, we might have identified the Dependency of external platform as a Risk. If that exists even during Design phase, impact will be more as right after development we may need the access to the external platform to do the validation.

Learn more about Risk Mitigation by enrolling in our PMP® Training. For more details, do click http://goo.gl/MPBy1r