Effective Risk Mitigation: A User Prospective

Much effort has been put in order to identify the possible risks hindering the successful completion of software projects. Techniques in risk mitigation, management and monitoring plan devise the estimation process of risk likelihood and their possible impact on the progress of software project. Risk Mitigation, Monitoring, Management is a thorough and continuous process, which aims to bring the potentially losing project to the safer shore. Hence every phase of this plan is of equal importance. Generally more focus is maintained in the initial phases i.e. the identification and assessment of possible risks. Whereas formalizing a concrete avoidance / mitigation plan must also be devised, to ensure that risk do not mature in problem. A response should be ready in advance. Generally it is easier to identify and assess the risk but to suggest suitable mitigation / contingency plan is far more difficult task. The measurement of effectiveness of these mitigation / contingency plans should be well carried. It must ensure that after the execution of such plans the risk exposure is reduced or preferably eliminated. This can be referred as the feasibility of the mitigation / contingency plan, which is critically analyzed and measured for its effectiveness. This paper focuses on the prioritization and then handling and proposing the mitigation strategy for each risk factor. It is strongly believed that just proposing the mitigation strategy is not sufficient. Although all the mitigation strategies proposed in the paper are the outcomes of the views of experienced people having both: the vision and intuition yet it was necessary to observe the acceptability of such mitigation strategies among the people and the organizations who are affected from such risk arrivals. In order to justify the need a survey was conducted among fifty representative people from different domains among students, academicians and professionals. The risk factor at question and the proposed mitigation strategy were put before the respondents and they were required to support the possible strategy that they believed suitable for that specific risk factor. This practice was repeated for all risk factors. It was also decided that one individual would support only one mitigation strategy for one risk.