Which action involves doing whatever you can to make sure the positive risk happens?

Negative risks are when things could go wrong on a project. However, it’s also possible for risks to be positive. Yes, really! We tend to think less about positive risk in project management, probably because team members, managers, and project sponsors focus more on what could go wrong.

Positive risks are situations that could provide great opportunities if you only harness them effectively. There are also formal management strategies for responding to positive risks. They are: exploit, share, enhance, and accept. Let’s look at them in more detail.

Exploit

This response strategy tries to make sure that the risk happens, so you get the perceived benefit from the situation. Simple ways to do this could be to train the team to give them extra skills or to tweak your deliverables slightly so that they respond better to the opportunity. Remember that positive risk doesn’t have to only apply to the deliverables you are creating. It can also apply to the way you are creating them. 

An excellent example of this is if someone on your team comes up with a way of cutting the project timescales by 10% if you make a change to a project management process. By training people in the new process, you can increase the chance that you’ll exploit the opportunity to deliver 10% faster. It can be hard to think up ways that you could exploit the opportunity so that you make the situation happen. Spend some time brainstorming to see what you can come up with.

Share

An excellent example of the share response is in bidding for work. You may find that your bid would be more successful if you partnered (i.e., shared) with another firm. The opportunity (in this case, winning the bid) would be more likely to happen if you worked as a team. Another example might be if you are building something, working in partnership with a specialist firm for a particular component might give you the edge.

Enhance

Enhancing the opportunity can come about when you focus on the causes of the opportunity. In other words, what are the factors that are going to make this positive risk or opportunity happen? Think about how you can influence those factors. This could be by introducing software features to make the new product more marketable or shareable.

It relies on being able to adequately articulate what is going to cause a beneficial situation to happen so that you can focus your efforts appropriately. Get everyone on the project team together to come up with ideas. You’ll find it easier to work out how best to respond to the situation as positive risk response strategies can be challenging to get your head around.

Accept

As above, this is the "do nothing" response. It’s a perfectly valid response, but one that might need a bit of explaining to your project sponsor. It simply means that you accept that the opportunity is going to come your way or it isn’t. You do nothing to influence it either way, and you don’t put any plans in place to deal with it. The most likely situations for using this approach are:

• When taking action is going to be too costly for the benefit you’d get back if the opportunity did happen.
• When taking action is disproportionate regarding work: it’s too much effort to put the plans in place based on the likelihood of the risk happening.

There might be other situations where you would instead do nothing. As long as you take this option as a considered approach and not because you didn’t get round to making a decision, then that’s fine.

Talking About Positive Risk

Most risk management is focused on trying to avoid situations that are going to be bad for your project. That's why it can be hard to get people to think about the things that might go right, and how, in those cases, you are going to capitalize on the situation and make the most from it. Use your Project Board meetings as a starting point for this kind of discussion.

Whichever one of these positive risk response strategies you choose, your risk response strategy should be noted down in your risk register.

Question 2_____ involves doing whatever you can to make sure the positive risk happens.a. Risk acceptanceb. Risk enhancementSelected:c. Risk exploitationThis answer is correct.d. Risk sharingYou are correct! Risk exploitation involves doing whatever you can to make sure the positive riskhappens.

Question 4________ is an uncertainty that can have a negative or positive effect on meeting project objectives.

Get answer to your question and much more

0/1Question 5True or false? A risk management plan is a plan that documents the procedures for managing riskthroughout a project.No answer provided

Get answer to your question and much more

Refer to “Planning Risk Management” in the textbook for more information.Question 7_________ are indicators or symptoms of actual risk events, such as a cost overrun on early activitiesbeing a symptom of poor cost estimates.

Get answer to your question and much more

1/1Question 8True or false? Performing qualitative risk analysis involves prioritizing risks based on their probabilityand impact of occurrence.Selected:TrueThis answer is correct.

Which action involves doing whatever you can to make sure the positive risk happens risk exploitation risk enhancement risk sharing risk acceptance?

Which of the following response strategies for positive risk includes allocating ownership of the risk to another party?

Which process involves determining what risks are likely to affect a project?

Which process involves prioritizing risks based on their probability of occurrence and impact?