1. By Team T-Rex James Houlihan And Gavin Herbert
Risk Management
By Team T-Rex
James Houlihan
And
Gavin Herbert

2. What is Risk Management?
Risk management is an essential part of good management practice and features prominently on the agendas of senior managers and education bodies.
Whilst risk management applies to all areas of organisational activity its relevance is particularly clear in relation to projects, particularly projects with an IT or systems component.
It is probably fair to say that risk management is the single most important component of project management.
Project Managers claim that the biggest mistake people make in managing risk is to identify the risk but do nothing about it. Which is true since there are never enough resources to address all possible risks.

3. What is Risk Management? (cont’d)
Management of the pure risks to which a company might be subject. It involves analysing all exposures to the possibility of loss and determining how to handle these exposures through practices such as avoiding the risk, retaining the risk, reducing the risk etc.
The concept phase of a project centres on measuring and judging the risk-reward trade-off: what rewards will the organization reap from a successful project, and what are the risks of an unsuccessful project. Project risks are often discussed in very little detail or just not discussed at all.

4. Risk Management Diagram

5. Types of Risk Management
There are two kinds of risk management, PROJECT risk and PRODUCT risk. Many companies and their project managers do not perform solid risk management at the right time to really help and also do not update the risk items periodically to retire the risk or enhance the plans.
Using the methodology to do a brief evaluation and ranking of risks can lead to avoidance of significant risks and the resulting damage in even simple projects.

6. Types of Risk Management cont’d
For example, Medical device companies are required to do Product Risk management to prevent harm to the user, consumer or patient. But those same companies do not spend much time on Project Risk.
For us working in the Multimedia industry, our risk management protocols would be quite the opposite.
We would spend much more time assessing Project Risk.

7. Risk Management Plan
Companies who do carry out risk management, will generally create what is known as a Risk Management Plan, at the start of the project.
A Risk Management Plan is a document prepared by the project manager, which is normally comprised of a clear and basic table used to foresee risks, estimate impacts, and define responses to issues.

8. Risk Management Plan Example

9. Risk Management Plan cont’d
Although the table in the previous slide may look simple enough, its purpose is far greater than it looks.
It is used as a precautionary guideline to carry out a projects steps successfully, whilst remaining prepared for errors and bugs along the way.
Risk Management Plans are essential to a companies success and yet, they are still rarely implemented into projects today.

10. Risk Management in the Multimedia Industry
As you already well know, projects in the multimedia industry tend to be colossal in size.
Definition of the word “Multi”: Combining prefix indicating more than one, multiples, multiplication, from Latin multus meaning ‘many’, ‘much’.
This states that multimedia projects involve the creation/use of MANY types of media, which in turn leads to a multitude of risks to consider when developing.

11. Risk Management in the Multimedia Industry cont’d
There are so many areas where risks need to be considered when developing in the Multimedia industry.
For Example: Prepare for coding problems, video incompatibility, embedding problems, rendering problems, browser compatibility etc.
The type of risk management we, as multimedia students will need to rely on, is Project Risk Management.

12. What is Project Risk Management
Simply put, for Project Risk management, even a few hours spent with the management team and the project team can identify areas where assumptions are not the same and where the participants with deeper knowledge perceive higher risk.
A simple brainstorming process can unearth many potential risks, and a short time discussing those risks can lead to understanding their relative risk and some possible avoidance or mitigation approaches.

13. Project Risks: Organizational
No plan for holidays or vacation time in the project resource calendar. No one is ever sick. No one leaves for another job or project.
Needed resources are available when and where needed. No time or effort allowed for recruiting, hiring, or training.
No training for the project staff is needed, or even allowed.
Other projects will not interfere (prioritization).
Specific resource loading is ignored (so some people need to work 24 hours a day).

14. Project Risks: Technical
The team has worked together before and done this type of technical project before (usually NOT the case).
There will be no defects (or bugs) to fix, that no time is needed for the fix and re-test.
No time for integration at key milestones, testing or bug fixes at those points.

15. Conclusion
Risk Management in the multimedia industry requires us to employ the use of Project Risk Management when developing our systems and projects in industry.
Although Risk Management is an area less assessed in industry, that does not mean it is not fundamental to a successful project delivered on the deadline.