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ScienceSoft’s Approach to Risk Management
With 35 years in software development, ScienceSoft prioritizes risk management as the guarantee of high project predictability and long-lasting cooperation success.
Risk Management Pitfalls that Never Occur at ScienceSoft
Failure to see the full scope of risks applicable to a particular initiative leads to a continuous struggle with “unexpected” threats. It may result in project delays, unplanned expenses, or even complete failure.
Poor risk mitigation planning (or total lack thereof) results in inconsistent and inefficient risk mitigation and negatively affects project scope, budget, timelines, and quality objectives.
Non-disclosing the potential threats or denying the risks contributes to unrealistic expectations, prevents collaborative issue resolution, and results in customer dissatisfaction with project progress.
Our Mature Risk Management Principles
Comprehensive risk assessment
Starting from project inception and throughout the SDLC, we constantly evaluate and monitor the potential risks. Having 7–20 years of relevant experience, our PMs and software engineers know the risks specific to various solutions and development scenarios and can promptly spot any arising issues.
Pragmatic planning
When planning risk mitigation steps, we always consider our client’s main priorities (e.g., minimized project cost, fast feature delivery). In doing so, we focus on avoiding the risks that would cause the greatest damage to the project’s business outcomes.
Honesty about project risks
We preserve our clients’ right to control the project, knowing that open collaboration brings far better outcomes than one-sided efforts. We stay 100% transparent and ensure the customer has a realistic picture of the project’s health, potential challenges, and contingency plans.
Software Development Risk Factors We Recognize and Address
Follow the links to explore ScienceSoft’s approach to tackling common project risks.
Operational risk factors
- Estimation accuracy
- Risk of scope creep
- Team composition adequacy
- Collaboration efficiency
- Software documentation and reporting clarity
- Feasibility of changes
Business risk factors
- Delivery speed and accuracy
- User adoption rate
- Software maintenance costs
- Regulatory compliance
External risk factors
- Economic and geopolitical risks
- Legislative changes
- Shifts in customer preferences
- Evolving technology landscape
How We Manage Software Development Risks, Step by Step
Here are the major activities ScienceSoft performs across the software development life cycle to successfully address project risks:
1. Risk identification
At the initial project stage, we analyze the client’s requirements for the solution and development flow, learn their definition of success, and determine internal and external risk factors.
For customer convenience, we compose a tailored risk breakdown structure reflecting all potential exposures, categorized according to the area they stem from.
2. Risk assessment and triaging
Our experts quantify the impact of various risks on the scope, timeline, budget, and quality goals to see how arising risks (e.g., scope extension) influence the planned flow (e.g., resource involvement and delivery dates). We evaluate the probability of risk occurrence and score the risks based on their severity of impact. And since risks are closely bound to pre-agreed software development KPIs, we triage them according to the priority of the project objectives they may affect.
SEE A SAMPLE RISK MATRIX WE RELY ON
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3. Risk mitigation planning
As a part of project planning, we design a risk mitigation strategy and plan to address the potential risks. In particular, we set risk tolerance thresholds, define the team members responsible for risk escalation and handling, establish a sustainable risk control framework, and outline the risk-related collaboration flows.
The art of risk management doesn’t boil down to planning for the foreseeable and tackling the unforeseeable. Rather, its primary goal is to identify and prevent the avoidable. Our experience shows that meticulous business analysis, project planning, and software design help eliminate certain risks altogether, so we move on to a risk mitigation plan only after addressing the known challenges.
4. Risk monitoring
During the project, we continuously monitor the emerging risks to promptly detect potential threats, identify their root cause, and handle them before they negatively impact project KPIs. To achieve this, we:
- Promote an open discussion within the teams and with the client’s stakeholders to identify bottlenecks.
- Conduct regular variance analysis to see the difference between the actual and planned project performance.
- Analyze variance trends to understand risk dynamics and magnitude.
- Track the utilization of contingency reserves to control the risk-associated overspend.
We regularly report risks to the client to keep them updated about the project’s health, likely challenges, and planned risk mitigation actions.
We use collaborative risk monitoring tools like Jira and Azure DevOps to quickly gather project performance data, calculate the required metrics, and instantly spot problematic areas. It helps our teams maintain joint control over the development flow and better align on the risk mitigation activities.
5. Implementing risk mitigation steps
If a risk exceeds the pre-set tolerance level, we immediately enforce the action plan to suppress the exposure and minimize project variance. At the same time, we differentiate between project derailers (e.g., scope creep) and reasonable changes (e.g., adding new valuable features) and treat the latter as opportunities rather than threats.
6. Continuous improvement of risk response
We constantly measure the efficiency of our risk mitigation steps and use the insights to update the risk response plan for faster, more adequate, and less effort-intensive issue resolution.
Learn What Our Clients Appreciate the Most
We appreciate the proactive approach of ScienceSoft and their ability to suggest improvements to a prospective solution on both architectural and business levels.
It’s a pleasure to work with experts who are knowledgeable, self-motivated and sincerely interested to do the best of their ability.
I can see that they really think through the lens of their client, which is priceless in this domain. They've found answers to many undefined challenges and suggested dozens of impactful improvements for our IT environment.
