Successful Risk Management

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Successful Risk Management

Risk management emerges as a crucial activity when managing agile projects. The inherent flexibility of a system, while being a great asset, calls for keeping a sharp eye on risk from the very early stages. This is more so relevant when enterprises move to relatively new technologies like virtualization and cloud computing.

Here are the steps to successful risk management and minimizing project overshoots:

  • Embed risk management: Start by making risk management an integral part of every project and process workflow. As a project manager, you might have to show to the top management how this approach ensures robust development and timely project delivery, but it’s every bit worth the effort.
  • Assessing risk: The next part is to get everyone together to assess possible risks involved, but take care not to let the meeting be a ground for pessimism! Most of the times threats bring along unforeseen opportunities, and these should also be analyzed keenly.
  • Identify ownership: As soon as potential risks are identified, ownership should also be determined to prevent finger-pointing when something goes wrong. Rather, the focus at that time should be to get the project moving.
  • Risk analysis: At this stage, the identified risks are analyzed for severity levels and assigned a rating from low to high. For risk factors that have high severity, plan B needs to be created. At the same time, effective policies for managing these risk factors should be developed.

Being proactive is the key when it comes to managing risk. At the end of the day, risk management should not become a tiresome process but should add value to the business.

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