Risk Management Discipline for Operations
An important aspect of managing service levels is understanding how to manage risk. It is extremely difficult and financially impossible to eliminate all risks, so the goal of risk management should be to control the risks to an acceptable level within the constraints of available resources. Reducing risk in each phase of the Exchange service management life cycle and for each relationship in the Exchange service map requires that you:
| • | Assess risks continuously. The team should never stop identifying new risks and should periodically re-evaluate existing risks. |
| • | Integrate risk management into every role and every function. At a high level, every role should share part of the responsibility for managing risk, and every process should be designed with risk management in mind. |
| • | Treat risk identification positively. For risk management to succeed, team members must be willing to identify risk without fear of retribution or criticism. |
| • | Use risk-based scheduling. Maintaining an environment often means making changes in logical sequence; where possible, the team should make the riskiest changes first to avoid wasting time and resources on changes that cannot be released. |
| • | Establish an acceptable process. Success requires a formal process that the team understands and uses. |
This guide discusses three important steps in risk management:
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For more information about risk management and the six steps inherent to it, see the Microsoft Operations Framework Risk Management Discipline for Operations white paper available from the MOF Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/cits/mo/mof/mofrisk.mspx.
