Managing Umbraco Project Risks

Most business projects involve some element of risk - negative events that may impact the project budget, quality or timescale. Web-based Umbraco projects are no different - their success often depends on how well the team manage and resolve risks so that their effects on project delivery are minimal.

At Carbon Six Digital we use a pretty simple process of risk management.

Risk management of web projects, like any other, is just the methodical identification of events that might occur to impact the project, assessment of how big the risk actually is and then putting plans in place to manage these risks.

When considering the size of the risk we look at how likely the event is to occur, and what impact the event will have if it does.  In practice, we want to focus our attention on those risks that are very likely to occur and which will have a high impact.

Once we have prioritised the risks we make plans to reduce, or deal with, the risk if it becomes a reality. These countermeasures depend very much on the nature of the risk at hand. For example, where a risk relates to the absence of one staff member having knowledge of a specific feature, a sensible countermeasure would be to cross train another team member.  Conversely, in the event of a technical risk where a new Umbraco Package may not be suitable, sensible mitigation would be to identify alternative packages which may be used instead.

It's impossible to control all the risks on every project, but the action of managing risks makes projects more resilient and more likely to succeed.

If you're in the throws of having made bad buying decisions last time you bought an Umbraco Site, perhaps because the risks weren't well controlled, you might want to consider using our Health Check service to get things back under control. See for more information.