Action steps for dealing with risk

The WeTrack risk and issue module allows you to create many type of action steps to produce an effective strategy for dealing with uncertainty. To effectively manage risk it is important to understand each type and how they are used.

We have written a fuller article on Strategy for dealing with Risks, Issues and Opportunities, but here we introduce the most common types of action - mitigation and contingency planning.

A mitigation plan is a series of actions you take in advance of a potential event that reduces the probability and/or impact of that event. Once a mitigating action has been taken, the probability and/or impact of the risk occurring is reduced. An example would be the risk that the internet connection to your venue may fail during your event; a mitigation of this risk would be to procure a second internet connection from a different provider. The impact of the first internet connection failing would now be reduced as there is a second connection to serve your venue. The service may not be at the level you planned for in normal operations but would be better than a complete outage.

A contingency plan, on the other hand, is your plan for a risk once it becomes an issue. A contingency plan will identify the likely steps needed to resolve a potential issue, including who is responsible for enacting them. To use our example of an internet connection failure, a contingency plan would list the steps to make sure all users were switched to the backup connection, as well as the steps to contact the service provider to have the primary connection restored. Once a contingency plan is completed, your project should be back on track, or as close to it as possible.