Risk Management Plan
Purpose
The purpose of this document is to provide a plan to identify and manage risks.
Management Plan
To manage risks, we will use the following procedure:
1.
Identify the risk
2.
Identify the phase that the risk is in.
3.
Enter the risk into our team’s risk management plan.
4.
Determine the risk’s probability of occurring and the severity to the project if the
risk occurs.
5.
Enter the risk probability and severity.
6.
Determine a strategy for managing the risk from the Risk Management Strategy
section.
7.
Mitigate or otherwise deal with the risk.
8.
Track the risk
We will deal with the risks by using the most appropriate risk management strategy. These
strategies are:
1.
Acceptance – If this strategy is chosen, we simple simply accept the consequence
of a risk if it does occur. This strategy will be chosen if the cost to deal with the risk is
greater than the cost of the risk occurring. This will also be the default strategy for any
risk that occurs that we have not identified.
2.
Avoidance – If this strategy is chosen, we will take steps to avoid the risk whatso-ever.
3.
Mitigation – If this strategy is chosen, we will take steps to decrease the severity
of the risk and/ or the probability that the risk will occur. We can accomplish this by
making contingency plans.
Risks that may impact our project:
A. No Customers
B. Overwhelming Customer Participation
C. Biased Users Flood Engine with Overly Positive/Negative Reviews
D. Overwhelming Customer Support Requests
E. Failing to Keep on Schedule
F. Competitors Copy Engine Functionality
G. Customers Require Many Specific Design Templates
A. No Customers: The success/failure of our product depends on it’s acceptance by the service
industry as a valuable tool used in rating and reviewing services of many different types. If the
service industry does not see the need for our product, then we will have little to no customers.
Mitigation Action: Proper marketing and product design is essential in mitigating this risk. Our
marketing team will be responsible for communicating to the service industry that there is an
intense need for our product. Also, our developers are responsible for creating the very best
engine possible so that it accepted by the service industry.
B. Overwhelming Customer Participation: The opposite of our first risk is that there will be
too many customers that are requesting our product that we will not be able to keep up with
demand. For each customer that we acquire, we must devout time to implementing, testing, and
tailoring our solution to fit their needs; all which require time and energy.
Mitigation Action: The number of employees greatly affects our production potential. Hiring
more employees means that we can have more customers to satisfy through the sale and
implementation of our engine. Employee training and competence also comes in to play. The
more knowledgeable our employees are, the better they can assist our customers.
C. Biased Users Flood Engine with Overly Positive/Negative Reviews: The proper
functionality of our engine depends on unbiased user ratings and reviews. If certain users choose
to unfairly rate and review services either positively or negatively for personal gain, then the
objectiveness of our engine will be compromised and the quality of our product will suffer.
Mitigation Action: Our engine must have a way to determine which users are abusing the
system and which ones are not. This can be done through the logging of usernames and IP
addresses when many positive/negative reviews are made by a certain user in a given amount of
time. This user will then be flagged, and can be dealt with later by site administrators.
D. Overwhelming Customer Support Requests: Once our engine has been installed and
configured to work with a client’s server and database backend, our work is not completely
finished. The customer will be able to purchase a service contract which will obligate us to
support any questions and come up with solutions to problems that the customer may have in the
future while using our product.
Mitigation Action: To mitigate this risk we need a full-time, dedicated Customer Support Team.
This team will be in charge of maintaining Customer Support Contracts and will assist our
customers with the problems that may arise from the user of our product.
E. Failing to Keep on Schedule: Making the deadlines is a problem with most all projects. Our
project involves the development of a lot of software, as well as the testing of this software. With
our project, we have service websites that are going to be counting on having our product for
their patrons by a certain time. If we fail to deliver the product in time, they’ll be losing money,
and we’ll be losing money.
Mitigation Action: The best way to ensure we deliver our product on schedule is to carefully
manage our development time. This can be done through the use of project management tools.
We plan to use Microsoft Project for the development of Rate It. By carefully breaking down all
of the tasks that must be completed it becomes easier to develop and accurate achievable
schedule. Using Microsoft Project we track our progress on individual tasks, making it easier for
us to track our overall progress and keep ourselves on schedule. Also, bi-weekly meetings will
keep everyone on the project up to date with current tasks and due dates.
F. Competitors Copy Engine Functionality: Because our engine is completely software based
and can be developed using free open source technologies such as PHP and MySQL, there is the
potential that competitors will choose to copy our engine’s functionality and design and perhaps
add new features that our engine does not have. The source code for our product will not be
available to the public, however clever developers will be able to copy the functionality of our
engine if they so choose.
Mitigation Action: Excellent marketing techniques and a creative development team will be
required to help mitigate this risk. The marketing team must convey to customers that our engine
is the best one to suit their needs. Also, the development team must constantly be coming up
with new ideas to keep us “ahead of the game” with our competitors. Finally, we must be able to
take legal actions against competitors that blatantly copy our engine’s design and functionality in
order to ensure the success of our product.
G. Customers Require Many Specific Design Templates: Since our engine is marketed
towards many different service industries, there will be the need for equally as many design
templates. These templates must be able to fit the specific needs of our customers while being
somewhat unique from customer to customer. This presents a challenge for the template
designers in that they do not want to have to design an entirely new template for each new
customer.
Mitigation Action: Much thought must be put in to each template so that it will work with
multiple service industries. The templates must be able to be customized with minimal effort by
the developers in order to save time and money. After we acquire a few customers from each
type of service industry, we will be able to create “master templates” for each industry that can
be retro-fitted with each specific customer’s logo and color palette.