Identifying Risks

Risks cannot be avoided, but they can be mitigated. Before you can mitigate a risk, however, you have to identify it, assign a likelihood and impact, and document it. After you understand the risk, you can develop an approach to mitigate the risk. Identifying risks is a team process, so every member of the envisioning team should attend a risk identification brainstorming session. The focus of the brainstorming session should be to identify any risk that might affect the virtualization project. You should collect both technical and business risks to ensure that you have identified as many potential risks to the project as possible. For example, technical risks should include resource risks, design risks, solution risks, and assumption risks. Business risks include budgetary risks, project schedule risks, personnel risks, and other nontechnical risks. Examples of common risks that many projects share include the following:

• Changing scope Scope changes have an impact on project schedule and budget.

• Loss of key project team members Project members get reassigned to other projects, change jobs within the company, or leave the company to seek new employment.

• Poor communication Poor communication among the project team members and between the team and those stakeholders outside the project can increase the possibility of incorrect assumptions and project shortfalls, resulting in customer satisfaction issues.

• Impact on security Network security (blocked ports on routers and firewalls) can affect the automated discovery and inventory of servers, resulting in servers having to be inventoried by hand.

• Funding changes Funding changes that reduce the project’s budget can affect the scope and return on investment of the project.