Risk management strategies must address multiple scenarios to be effective, since no company can always control external factors like natural disasters and economic shifts.
Step one in risk management involves identifying risks through analysis of project and undertaking data, while step two is engaging a wide variety of stakeholders for different perspectives.
Avoidance
Risk avoidance strategies aim to mitigate negative impacts by devising ways to stop their occurrence, such as evacuating employees prior to hurricane strikes in order to decrease the chances of losing lives, identifying expected and unexpected costs for projects before creating contingency or preventive plans, finding alternate team members in case of emergencies, and even blocking malware attacks by constantly scanning for new threats and promptly blocking them as soon as they arise.
Risk transfer involves assigning risks to third parties such as insurance companies and vendors so they bear liability for their consequences. While this strategy can often be the most cost-effective approach to risk management, it may still result in unexpected costs or delays to projects; additionally, it doesn’t take into account risks inherent to business activity, like price fluctuations among vendors; in these instances risk acceptance might be more suitable.
Mitigation
Risk identification is the initial step of mitigating risks for any business, which includes understanding all possible threats. Whether conducting risk analyses for Sarbanes Oxley compliance purposes or simply to avoid problems, assessments should be systematic and documented for maximum efficiency.
At this stage, it’s essential that you evaluate each risk’s likelihood and estimate its impact. This can be done by considering potential impacts to different stakeholders while taking into account whether or not an organization can absorb such an impactful result.
Once a risk has been identified, its next step should be reducing it. This can be accomplished through adopting and implementing best practices tailored to your particular project or industry, which help lower risks of failure and meet objectives efficiently while decreasing legal and insurance fees associated with breaches and issues requiring legal representation. By mitigating risks you increase the chance of reaching goals more quickly while expanding profit margins more rapidly.
Acceptance
Risk acceptance is a strategy in which businesses choose to accept certain levels of risk without mitigating or shifting for an agreed-upon period of time, with no further mitigation or transfer effort taken by mitigation or transfer measures. The thinking behind this approach is that if something unlikely or costly enough to mitigate is overlooked altogether, accepting its risk might be better than suffering an unnecessary loss.
Avoiding risks that could have a significant impact on projects or businesses is ideal, while mitigating means lessening their consequences through strategies such as hedging. Risk transference means passing responsibility onto another party such as insurance providers.
Risk acceptance can be the appropriate response when the probability or negative impact of a risk are very small, or resource constraints make other strategies unfeasible. For instance, if vendor prices will invariably increase in future years, it might be more cost-effective to accept this risk rather than try and avoid or minimize it.
