Mitigating risks doesn’t mean crossing your fingers

As project managers we are always very attune to risks and the impacts they can have on our projects if they materialise and become issues. Our training and experience tell us that we need to be constantly on the lookout for factors in our environment that can adversely affect our planned activities.
Once we have identified a risk, we need to assess the likelihood and impact and determine a way to mitigate the risk. That is to say, we need to identify actions that will reduce or remove the risk.
In some cases it might not be easy to see how a risk can be mitigated. In these cases it can be tempting to state that the risk will be mitigated by being vigilant to the risk, to maintain visibility of the source of the risk and to review the risk frequently.
These activities, although helpful, don’t reduce the size of the threat to the project and might only put us in a better position to react when the risk develops into an issue.
As an example, our project might reliant on an SME who has been assigned to other work. We could propose that we will mitigate this risk by keeping in close touch with the manager of the other work and reminding them of the dependency we have on the SME.
By doing this we are essentially hoping that the SME will be assigned to our project when we need them. There might be no guarantee that we will get access to this person and it is highly possible that the work on the other project will get delayed, thus delaying the availability of the SME for our project.
The best way to manage a risk is to remove it.
In the case abovIn the case above, rather than crossing our fingers and hoping for the best, a better approach will be to set about independently sourcing our own SME. Generally, the best risk mitigations will be those that follow a different path to the risk itself.

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