Managing Risk
In striving to produce great outcomes, engineering managers must work to avoid disaster scenarios that could arise for their businesses or teams. The practice of avoiding or minimizing disaster scenarios is called managing risks.
Risks are any factors that have the potential to lead to failures. In other words, risks are threats to projects and products. For example, a common risk for software development teams is having a lack of redundancy in staffing or in systems that makes the team vulnerable to sudden loss of knowledge or data. Risks may not always materialize into real problems, but to be prepared for when they do, it is good to develop an awareness of risks. The term managing risk describes both identifying and responding to risk.
Risk management is its own field of study, so there is a broad body of accumulated knowledge, books, research, and methodology in existence. For our purposes, we will cover basic concepts and ideas applicable to engineering managers...
