Productivity

Identification of risk sources provides a basis for systematically examining changing situations over time to uncover circumstances that impact the ability of the project to meet its objectives. Risk sources are both internal and external to the project. As the project progresses, additional sources of risk may be identified. Establishing categories for risks provides a mechanism for collecting and organising risks as well as ensuring appropriate scrutiny and management attention for those risks that can have more serious consequences on meeting project objectives.

To effectively control and manage risks through the duration of the work effort, follow a proactive program to regularly monitor risks and the status and results of the risk-handling actions. The risk management strategy defines the intervals at which the risk status should be revisited. This activity may result in the discovery of new risks or new risk-handling options that may require re-planning and reassessment. In either event, the acceptability thresholds associated with the risk should be compared against the status to determine the need for implementing a mitigation plan.

Control
Control is the deliberate use of the design process to lower the risk to acceptable levels. It requires the disciplined application of the systems engineering process and detailed knowledge of the technical area associated with the design. Control techniques are plentiful and include:

• Multiple concurrent design to provide more than one design path to a solution

• Alternative low-risk design to minimise the risk of a design solution by using the lowest risk design option

• Incremental development, such as preplanned product improvement, to disassociate the design from high-risk components that can be developed separately

• Technology maturation that allows high-risk components to be developed separately while the basic development uses a less risky and lower performance temporary substitute

• Test, analyse and fix that allows understanding to lead to lower risk design changes. (Test can be replaced by demonstration, inspection, early prototyping, reviews, metric tracking, experimentation, models and mockups, simulation, or any other input or set of inputs that gives a better understanding of the risk)

• Robust design that produces a design with substantial margin such that risk is reduced

• The open system approach that emphasises use of generally accepted interface standards that provide proven solutions to component design problems