Let's talk about risk.
Let’s talk about risk.
Risk isn’t something that only big enterprise teams need to consider.
Everyone needs to be looking at it.
In a digital agency you might feel that you’ve got too much going on to worry about risk.
All your risks are calculated and your appetite for risk is pretty high.
You don’t mind if something goes wrong, you’ll react to it if needed, but why waste any time on preparing for risks, listing them out in a raid log or similar - when most of the time they don’t happen anyway.
In my opinion, that thought process is broken.
Naturally we just assume at the start that things are going to go well, but we also know that change is inevitable… right? Not to mention the unpredictable external factors!
Here’s a plan to cover the basics:
- Once you’ve defined your appetite for risk, have a conversation with your team to make sure everyone is aligned.
- Make sure you build processes that factor in risk so you can ensure you don’t have pain down the road
- Document everything
- Communicate often
This will ensure quality, and give you the ability to manage issues as they arise.
If you’re reading this and still saying “oh we don’t have time to deal with that because we work at such speed and such pace”, I’d argue that the model that you are using for how you run your projects or your business might be broken (or at least too high risk) in the mid to long term.
It’s only a matter of time until something big comes along and throws a spanner in the works, that could probably have been avoidable, if you’d spent some time looking at risk and how you’re going to mitigate and manage it.
So you really need to weigh that up.
Is it worth making some changes now whilst you still have the ability to control things before they go wrong?
Or, if you don’t have the time or energy to do that now, could you build in some time or flexibility later in your project (or whatever we’re trying to achieve) to deal with any potential risks that we might surface?
It’s definitely worth a conversation, and one worth having with your team… or at very least, yourself.
