Risk mitigation, monitoring, and management (RMMM) plan. A risk management strategy can be included in the software project plan or the risk management steps can be organized into a separate Risk Mitigation, Monitoring and Management Plan. The RMMM plan documents all work performed as part of risk analysis and is used by the project manager as part of the overall project plan. Once RMMM has been documented and the project has begun, risk mitigation and monitoring steps commence. Risk mitigation is a problem avoidance activity.
Risk monitoring is a project tracking activity with three primary objectives:
(1) To assess whether predicted risks do, in fact, occur; (2) To ensure that risk aversion steps defined for the risk are being properly applied; and (3) To collect information that can be used for future risk analysis.
In many cases, the problems that occur during a project can be traced to more than one risk. Another job of risk monitoring is to attempt to allocate origin (what risk(s) caused which problems throughout the project).
An effective strategy must consider three issues:
• Risk avoidance
• Risk monitoring
• Risk management and contingency planning.
If a software team adopts a proactive approach to risk, avoidance is always the best strategy. This is achieved by developing a plan for risk mitigation. To mitigate this risk, project management must develop a strategy for reducing turnover. Among the possible steps to be taken are
• Meet with current staff to determine causes for turnover (e.g., poor working conditions, low pay, and competitive job market).
• Mitigate those causes that are under our control before the project starts.
• Once the project commences, assume turnover will occur and develop techniques to ensure continuity when people leave.
• Organize project teams so that information about each development activity is widely dispersed.
• Define documentation standards and establish mechanisms to be sure that documents are developed in a timely manner.
• Conduct peer reviews of all work (so that more than one person is "up to speed).
• Assign a backup staff member for every critical technologist. As the project proceeds, risk monitoring activities commence. The project manager monitors factors that may provide an indication of whether the risk is becoming more or less likely. In the case of high staff turnover, the following factors can be monitored:
• General attitude of team members based on project pressures.
• The degree to which the team has jelled.
• Interpersonal relationships among team members.
• Potential problems with compensation and benefits.
• The availability of jobs within the company and outside it.
In addition to monitoring these factors, the project manager should monitor the effectiveness of risk mitigation steps. RMMM steps incur additional project cost. Part of risk management, therefore, is to evaluate when the benefits accrued by the RMMM steps are outweighed by the costs associated with implementing them. In essence, the project planner performs a classic cost/benefit analysis.