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The team can take any or all of these actions to mitigate a risk:
• Alter the project plan. The project schedule can be adjusted to help reduce the risk. Riskier
tasks can be moved earlier in the project, or given more time. This will give the team an
early warning or a time cushion in case the risks materialize. The project manager can
also hold an additional estimation session to break down the riskiest tasks into sub-
tasks. More detailed planning will help reduce the risk.
• Add additional tasks. There are certain actions that can be added to the schedule to help
avoid risks. For example, if there is a high probability that a critical team member will
leave the organization, cross-training tasks can be assigned to other people. This will
increase total effort in the project, but it will be worth it if the team member leaves.
• Plan for risks. For risks with a high impact that do not need specific tasks or project plan
changes, the project manager should have the team spend a few minutes identifying the
steps that should be taken in case the risk does occur. These do not need to be added to
the project schedule, but they should be written down and added to the risk plan. This
way, if the risk does occur, nobody will panic. Problems that have a large impact on the
project can be demoralizing to the team and may throw the project into chaos. Simply
having preplanned the steps needed to fix the problem is highly reassuring; it keeps the
team feeling like they are on track.

Once the mitigation steps are identified, all of these risks and actions should be docu-
mented in a risk plan. The easiest way to do that is to create a simple spreadsheet with five
columns: Risk (one to three sentences that describe each risk), Probability (the estimated
probability from 1 to 5), Impact (the estimated impact from 1 to 5), Priority (Probability ×
Impact), and Action (the specific actions that will be taken to mitigate the risk, or “None”
if the risk is deemed a low enough priority to ignore). Figure 2-1 shows a sample risk plan.

NOTE
A more detailed risk mitigation process is described in Making Process
Improvement Work by Neil Potter and Mary Sakry (Addison Wesley, 2002).

Project Plan Inspection Checklist

The project plan—including the project schedule—should be reviewed (see Chapter 5)
using this inspection checklist:

Statement of work
Does the project plan include a statement of work (SOW)?

Is the SOW complete—does it contain all of the features that will be developed?
Are all work products represented?
If estimates are known, have they been included?
Resources
Does the project plan include a resource list?
Does the resource list contain all resources available to the project?

28 CHAPTER TWO