Avoid, Mitigate, Accept or Transfer?

The actions you take surrounding risk are entirely down to you. Also, how often you look at the risks facing your organisation is entirely driven by you. No-one external to your organisation is going to chase you up about this…. BUT it is also your responsibility to ensure you have looked at the risks to your organisation and put a strategy in place for dealing with them.

Broadly, there are 4 ways you can deal with a risk: avoid it, mitigate (or control) it, accept it or transfer it. What do we mean by those 4 terms? Lets use a real example:

The scenario is that you are running a project and to deliver it successfully, you are relying on the skills of 10 key personnel. Their skills are in short supply and there is an active market for them outside the company. The impact on the project if they leave is large; and because of better pay and conditions available elsewhere, then the probability of them leaving before the end of the project is quite high. So we are dealing with a high impact/high probability risk. So you can choose to:

  • Avoid the risk by doing your project differently using other, more common skills.
  • Mitigate it by paying a retention bonus of pay rise to keep the skills in house until the project is complete.
  • Accept it and deal with the turbulence if they choose to leave – then it becomes an issue.

or you could

  • Transfer it by outsourcing that part of the delivery so the risk becomes someone else’s problem. At a suitable price, of course!

Here at St Andrews Consulting, we have a structured process that will help you define the right approach for you to take to each of the risks to your journey on the Highway.