ANSWER

Common strategies for dealing with negative risks include:

• Acceptance – The project or organization decides to accept the risk, without making any specific effort to address it.
• Transfer – The responsibility for managing a risk and dealing with any possible impacts are assigned to a third party (external to the project and / or organization).
• Avoidance – A specific course of action is undertaken to remove the risk, or prevent its occurrence.
• Mitigation – Steps are taken to minimize the probability of risk occurrence, and / or to minimize the impact if it did occur.

The specific strategy or response used for any given risk will depend upon the nature of the risk, including its assessed probability and impact. A project team or organization may be willing to accept a risk with low probability and low impact, but may try to mitigate or avoid risks with high probability and / or high impact.

It is important to pro-actively monitor risks throughout the project, and to identify events or circumstances that may lead to escalation of the probability or impact for any given risk. Even risks that have been accepted should not be ignored, since the threat level or the organization’s tolerance for risk can change as the project progresses. Risks may be linked to related project milestones, activities or deliverables to make them easier to manage.

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Sandy Lambert
Business Architect
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