Risk is the likelihood of any unfavorable event that could arise from internal or external sources and could be lessened by taking preventative measures. Every undertaking carries some level of risk. When working on a project, there are really countless things that could go wrong and keep you from reaching your objectives. Through risk management, you may reduce the likelihood of project failure and maintain control over the project’s budget, timeline, and quality standards.
The traditional PMBoK guidance categorizes risk management into four processes:
- Recognition. Identify the hazards that could keep you from accomplishing the objectives of your project.
- Examination. Find out which dangers are the most hazardous.
- Arranging. Make plans for the riskiest situations.
- Observation and command. Follow the project’s plan and keep an eye out for potential hazards.
We’ll discuss website development risks in this post, along with how we at RubyGarage lessen the chance of running into these unforeseen circumstances.
Risk: Work scope
Generally speaking, the scope of work (SOW) contains details on clients and contractors as well as the deliverables and milestones of a project. Since every contract and set of criteria is unique, it can be difficult to identify a relevant scope of work, and it takes time to provide comprehensive paperwork outlining the scope of work. These are typical dangers associated with the work’s scope:
- The work’s scope is not clearly stated. Here, there’s a chance that crucial information will be overlooked or that the scope of the activity will be defined incorrectly.
- creep in scope. The term “scope creep” describes unforeseen adjustments and unchecked expansion of a project’s scope. Scope creep can result in overspending, missed deadlines, and even project failure.
- Including extraneous features. “Gold plating” is the term used by PMBoK to describe the inclusion of features that were not initially requested within the scope. Gold plating is seen as a poor management approach and a source of added risk (more expenses, time, testing, human resources, etc.).
Although project managers strive to reduce or completely avoid SOW modifications, there may be times when they are urgently required for a project. We adhere to Agile processes in our workflow, which support an iterative approach to change implementation. This kind of strategy is implemented through sprints, which are development cycles that usually span two to four weeks. The team selects which features to add to the product next, how to test them, how to validate them (by establishing acceptance criteria), and other decisions during a sprint.
By constantly evaluating change during a project’s development and reshaping the scope at the beginning of each iteration, agile approaches overcome the issue of scope creep. The issue of scope creep is thus rendered irrelevant. This method is efficient in a continuous testing setting where application faults are the driving force behind scope modifications. By doing this, a project team may keep projects on schedule and promptly address problems at the outset.
Risk: teamwork and human resources
You can never undervalue human resources. Establishing cooperation and facilitating easy communication between a development team and a customer is one of a project manager’s duties. The following are some typical dangers that human resources may present:
- Switching teams. Situations can change: developers could become ill, take a vacation, or decide to quit their jobs in the middle of a project.
- It’s time to study. A team may need some time to learn a new hardware component, software, or programming language.
- Ineffective team unity. Teams can cause each other’s wheels to come off due to internal disagreements.
- hiring procedure. Hiring experts with critical talents takes time, and occasionally the hiring process may drag on for too long.
- stakeholders who are not involved. People with an interest in a project but who are not actively involved in its development are called stakeholders (end users are also considered stakeholders). Stakeholders’ roles in projects are determined by their degree of interest and influence; those with high levels of both get to decide on important project decisions. Ignoring or underengaging stakeholders is a common project management error that can result in a lack of commitment and an inability to produce a successful product.
At RubyGarage, we understand how crucial human resources are to the accomplishment of a project’s objectives. Our personnel are carefully chosen, hired, and trained to produce devoted workers and outstanding team players. Having employees means that the business is directly in charge of their performance, which is a huge advantage. With over five years of experience in web development, our company, RubyGarage, employs seventy workers across five divisions. Working with an established business like RubyGarage gives you access to a management team with a track record.
At RubyGarage, we also have three tiers of risk control for human resources. To start, we operate a retention program and employ a psychologist in-house to create a better working atmosphere. Our psychologist works with us to intentionally create a happy work environment, which improves the culture inside our company.
Secondly, we ensure that in the event that one of your programmers takes sick leave or goes on vacation, there are additional developers with the same level of expertise available to take over. Third, project managers oversee the members of our development team and resolve conflicts and misunderstandings among them.
Technical Risk
Technological risks are inherent in any IT project. A few dangers that are crucial to consider when overseeing web development projects are as follows:
- The program isn’t expandable. Software’s scalability refers to its capacity to accommodate growing workloads and/or facilitate easy replication in other locations. If an application was created by an earlier team that did not build it for scale, you may encounter challenges in fulfilling performance requirements.
- Applications aren’t consistent. Applications can crash for a variety of reasons, including incompatible browsers, improper memory use, life-threatening production flaws, and more. Crashing your app will always leave customers disappointed and hurt its chances of becoming popular.
At Ruby Garage, we use a variety of strategies to increase the reliability of applications. One is a version control system (VCM), which is software that enables programmers to collaborate on their work and prevents them from having to redo each other’s code modifications. To put it briefly, a VCM enables team members to retrieve revisions and locate the specific code that resulted in a bug with ease.
To guarantee the quality of our code, we also use Git. VCMs are typically employed as a component of the comprehensive workflow strategy known as code review. In terms of risk management, this method makes it simple to find and correct mistakes early on, before they cause losses, and to quickly maintain the code over time.
Our development team further uses automated testing. Every new piece of code is put through automated tests to ensure appropriate functionality and check quality at the lowest possible cost. Indeed, we adhere to the tenet that tests must be prepared before any code is produced. As a result, the likelihood of typos, grammatical errors, and other unanticipated problems in the product code is reduced, if not completely eliminated.
We link an application to crash reporting tools like Airbrake or Crashlytics as soon as a project is released in order to identify the specific code that is crashing and start debugging right away.
