Project Management for SMEs by 'Debo Ajayi - 1

We have a new contributor in the house!! Yaaay. Remember Debo, the project management guy? Yes?

No? Well, he'll be taking a series on project management for entrepreneurs starting today!

Employing Risk to Transform your business.

Okay, so I will be writing a weekly article here to help SMEs build their businesses using a proven technique to grow their business, customer base, portfolio and product line.

Off course the technique we would use is called Project Management.

Today we will focus on risk.

http://www.businessinsider.com/

Risk itself is an industry and we cannot pretend to do any justice to understanding or digging into the depths of risk, but we will look at risk and how we can use a renewed understanding to grow our businesses.

Risk is simply any event with a degree of uncertainty. Risk means that we do not know exactly if an event will occur or not.

If you look at my elementary definition, it is clear that risk is neither a good or a bad phenomenon...it is just a phenomenon

We consider risk to be a bad thing around this part of the world...but this isn't necessarily true. Our general attitude towards risk is Prayer (oh well...). We try to nullify the unknown but we can adopt a proactive method to resolve challenges that risk can induce.

Risk is not always a bad thing for businesses. It can be a good thing as it presents unique opportunities for capitalizing on uncertainties.

Whenever there is an outcome with uncertain outcomes we need to investigate weather or not there are positive possibilities or just negative ones.

If all the outcomes for an event are negative, here is what every business owner needs to do with negative risk;

1. Avoid.
2. Transfer
3. Mitigate

If the outcomes have any possibility of being positive...here are valid responses

1. Seek
2. Enhance
3. Exploit


Avoid:

When there is a possibility that an outcome will be negative, the things to do is avoid the outcome altogether. Somethings we need to pass off certain opportunities because the risk outcome isn't worth it. This is a valid response to uncertainty but needs to be assessed carefully. The decision should be made not out of fear but a conscious methodical process that will create opportunities in the future.

We would continue this series next week........

Thanks.