Hi Paul, your feedback would be appreciated.
State four responses that might be appropriate to top priority risks (threats or opportunities).
Four responses for threats: Avoid Threat, Accept Threat, Reduce Threat, Transfer Threat.
Four responses for Opportunity: Reject Opportunity, Share Opportunity, Enhance Opportunity, Exploit Opportunity
Avoid Threat: Take an action to avoid the risk, changing the scope or approach. Ex. Remove a feature, or use a different technology.
Accept Threat: Accept the risk, and take no action other than have a monitoring process to ensure that the threat doesn’t change.
Reduce Threat: Reduce the probability or the impact or both. Ex. Provide training, add more tests, etc.
Transfer Threat: move the risk from our risk log to someone else’s. Could be through a contract or an insurance policy. I think in our case ex. if we are expecting delivery from a different team, we need to have a commitment from them, and put the responsibility on them.
Reject Opportunity: choose not to take advantage of the opportunity, maybe because it requires too much effort or is not very valuable. An example would be we know that there is a release of a newer version we base our product on coming soon and were offered a package earlier to be able to test your product on before release. We can choose to reject this opportunity as it might require an extra QA and bug fixing iteration and might delay your release date. So it is an opportunity, but it might create too much work and effort that maybe it is not worth the risk
Share Opportunity: seek partners to capitalize on the circumstances. Share the opportunity with others to get the best out of it.
Enhance Opportunity: take steps to make sure that the opportunity risk happens, and the consequences are valuable. Ex. Finish the hotel renovation earlier, means we can sell rooms earlier. Finish product earlier, we can sell the product earlier.
Exploit Opportunity: Take no action to enhance the opportunity, only wait for it and then take advantage of it.
In addition to choosing the response strategy state four actions that a project manager should take when preparing responses to top priority risks.
1. Include the risks into the project plan.
2. Create Contingency plan for the major risks that could occur
3. Continually review risks
4. Keep the team continuously aware of the risks.
