Risk Management and FMEA, Product Development Risk Management is Essential to Project Management
It is said that “If you are not managing risk, you are not managing your project.” This is most applicable when it comes to managing risk in product development. Risk is the probability of something going wrong with your development project. Technology changes, customer requirements vary, schedules are always in flux, and your suppliers are in turmoil. In short, there are many things that can go wrong. What if you could predict what could go wrong? And more importantly, what if you could develop a plan to eliminate or mitigate your risks?
Risk Management is the ability to anticipate risks and develop plans to manage them; thus, creating more predictable schedules, improving reliability and customer satisfaction. In many cases, risk management prevents what otherwise might be a catastrophic failure of your development program.
Many companies have not been able to obtain the real benefits from a model of risk management, mostly because many texts are written for traditional risk management for the construction industry. Product development is very different because there is little if any stability, unlike construction which is very mature and stable. Properly applied, risk management will produce measurable results in scheduling, development costs, and improvement in reliability.
Our Guidebook was written by product developers with many years of experience in the “real world”, where traditional text book approaches fail. We set about developing a “how-to” guide that understand the pressures placed on you, the need to get to the point quickly and to show you step-by-step how to apply risk management.
