Objectives of Risk Mitigation and Planning

The objectives of risk mitigation and planning are to explore risk response strategies for the high risk items identified in the qualitative and quantitative risk analysis. The process identifies and assigns parties to take responsibility for each risk response. It ensures that each risk requiring a response has an owner. The owner of the risk could be an agency planner, engineer, or construction manager, depending on the point in project development, or it could be a private sector contractor or partner, depending on the contracting method and risk allocation.

Risk mitigation and planning efforts may require that agencies set policies, procedures, goals, and responsibility standards. Formalizing risk mitigation and planning throughout a highway agency will help establish a risk culture that should result in better cost management from planning through construction and better allocation of project risks that align teams with customer-oriented performance goals.

Once the agency planner, engineers, and construction managers have thoroughly analyzed the critical set of risks, they are in a better position to determine the best course of action to mitigate those risks. Pennock and Haimes of the Center for Risk Management of Engineering Systems state that three key questions can be posed for risk mitigation.
What can be done and what options are available?
What are the trade offs in terms of all costs, benefits, and risks among the available options?
What are the impacts of current decisions on future options?

An understanding of these three questions is critical to risk mitigation and risk management planning. Question 1 addresses the available risk response options, which are presented in the following section. An understanding of questions 2 and 3 is necessary for risk planning because they determine the impact of both the immediate mitigation decisions and the flexibility of risk mitigation and planning on future events.

What is Risk Mitigation and who will involve in Risk mitigation plan

Risk Mitigation is all about forecasting the possible
problems that might arise in future and finding out ways to
prevent it from occurring or do alternate ways to avoid the
problems from happening.

Hope Business Continuity plan/Disaster recovery is also a
part of Risk Mitigation. Let's say some criminal organization has planned
to blast your development center, all our clients would lose
all their money. This business continuity plan/Disaster
recovery is a step towards taking backup of all the data in
a different development center, so that even if your office
is gone, the clients don't lose out anything.

Risks and Mitigation

Any risks that will affect the testing process must be
listed along with the mitigation. By documenting the risks
in this document, we can anticipate the occurrence of it
well ahead of time and then we can proactively prevent it
from occurring. Sample risks are dependency of completion
of coding, which is done by sub-contractors, capability of
testing tools etc.

Exchange Rate Risk

The uncertainty of returns for investors that acquire foreign investments and wish to convert them back to their home currency. This is particularly important for investors that have a large amount of over-seas investment and wish to sell and convert their profit to their home currency. If exchange rate risk is high - even though a substantial profit may have been made overseas, the value of the home currency may be less than the overseas currency and may erode a significant amount of the investments earnings. That is, the more volatile an exchange rate between the home and investment currency, the greater the risk of differing currency value eroding the investments value.

Market Risk

The price fluctuations or volatility increases and decreases in the day-to-day market. This type of risk mainly applies to both stocks and options and tends to perform well in a bull (increasing) market and poorly in a bear (decreasing) market. Generally with stock market risks, the more volatility within the market, the more probability there is that your investment will increase or decrease.

Country Risk

This is also termed political risk, because it is the risk of investing funds in another country whereby a major change in the political or economic environment could occur. This could devalue your investment and reduce its overall return. This type of risk is usually restricted to emerging or developing countries that do not have stable economic or political arenas.

Financial Risk

Financial risk is the risk borne by equity holders (refer Shares section) due to a firms use of debt. If the company raises capital by borrowing money, it must pay back this money at some future date plus the financing charges (interest etc charged for borrowing the money). This increases the degree of uncertainty about the company because it must have enough income to pay back this amount at some time in the future.