Risk management strategies beyond spiking

The key concept: To understand the concept of risk management strategies and how to implement the risk management strategies in the right direction. The limitation of risk management strategies also is the important area to mention.

Argument:

Risks could vary a great deal in their impact, probability of occurrence. Hence it becomes very important for the success of the project to identify risks, set priorities, have risk control and mitigation strategies in place. Spikes are generally a very good way to avoid risks associated with certain gaps in knowledge, skill and technology. And that’s where small scale risk eliminating strategies such as ‘spikes’ run out of steam.

The Risk management strategies (that go beyond spiking) are mostly divided based upon four major risk treatment categories (and hence risk management categories): avoidance, reduction, retention and transfer.

Risk avoidance is ‘don’t practice something if it involves risk’. E.g., don’t use c++ (use java) to avoid serious memory management bugs (but what if all the programmers only know C++). Risk reduction is agile is an excellent example, develop and deliver incrementally to avoid huge risk of failing the whole project. Risk transfer is where risks are transferred to another source (outsourcing!) or for example, insurance. Risk retention is be prepared to accept the risk. If a risk is not managed, it happens, it retains automatically

Conclusion:

To conclude that, while large risk management strategies are essential to any decent sized project, spiking has its own value – very simple, follow the basics approach where known gaps are spiked. Spikes fail where gaps are not known or their risk causes are not known. That’s where the four risk management come into play and come handy!