Mitigation
Introduction
Once you’ve identified and ranked your risks, you can begin to engage with them. Specifically, you can begin the creative process of risk mitigation. This is one of the most impactful (and fun, actually) activities you can undertake as an entrepreneur. Risks become your opponent – the barriers to your success – and your role is to overcome them, by any means at your disposal. Once all the risks to a project are mitigated, the project must succeed. While this statement feels like a double negative, it is intuitive, and extremely powerful.
What
If you have hundred, or even dozens of risks, you must start by prioritizing. Prioritization is where risk management systems diverge. Some suggest weighted averages of “effect” and “impact”, some suggest incorporating the skills of the team into the equation, most attempt to account for the probability of the cause actually having the effect. The point is that prioritization is an art, not a science. Do your best, and spend your resources against the top of the list, then work your way down. Once you have a prioritized list, the team must create mitigations. This is the core and the power of risk management. Typically, three mitigations will spring quickly to mind. Push your teams to get to five. In our experience the last two force creativity, and often are the most effective. Executing on your mitigation(s) (one may suffice, or you may need multiple layers) becomes your project task list. Once your risks are mitigated, all that remains is blocking and tackling.
When
As part of project management/risk management.
Why
The mitigation is the output of risk management. It is the foil to the risk. A prioritized risk without a good mitigation should keep project managers up at night!
Learning Goals
Familiarity with risk mitigation processes.