Explaining Risk Mitigation

Risk Mitigation, in context of a project, can be defined as a measure or set of measures taken by a project manager to reduce or eliminate the risks associated with a project. Risks can be of various types such as technical risks, monetary risks and scheduling based risks. The project manager takes complete authority of reducing the probability of occurrence of risks while executing a project.

When delegating tasks to individuals, their technical competency might be overlooked. If so, then the chances of the project getting delayed

click to enlarge

Another alternative is to divide a complex task between team members and then delegate each part to a single individual. By reducing a complex technical task into larger simple tasks, the execution time may increase but the chances of missing the deadline for task completion can be kept up as the risk involved in the task is being diversified by the project manager among multiple individuals.

Image Credit: Icon Finder/Alessandro Rei

A project manager is exposed to various challenges and has to make critical decisions in seeing through the project’s execution with minimal risk. Cost based risk factors are difficult to estimate and intuition in making decisions which may increase the costs of deploying a task should be avoided. A safer bet used by the project managers is to use sophisticated cost estimation techniques. Some of the techniques such as Critical Path Method (CPM)/Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) are used to oversee deployment of a task or set of tasks and analyzing the risks involved. Advanced techniques such as Expected Monetary Value (EMV) provide an insight on financial gain or loss if an event does or does not occur.

Executing the right task at the right time would help in lowering the risk of not meeting the project due date. Tasks can be assigned to individuals in two ways. The first one is to calculate the estimated processing time of each of the tasks and executing the tasks based on the Shortest Processing Time (SPT). The second one is to define due dates for each of the tasks and process them based on the Earliest Due Date (EDD). A project manager is the best judge here as to which method he would like to use in scheduling the tasks and delegating them to the individuals associated with the execution of the project. An advanced method of decreasing the risks while scheduling of the work based tasks is by using the Monte Carlo Simulation method.

A project manager can mitigate risks by classifying risks based on the priority of being a threat to the project’s success. The risks can be classified as being high, medium and low. Once classified, the concerned project manager will be able to devote time based on the classification and eliminate the risks in a sequential or in a random manner.