Enhance Risk Response vs Exploit Risk Response
Enhance Risk Response vs Exploit Risk Response – Risk response strategies are applied to identified risks. It is important to classify an identified project risk as positive or negative to apply the most effective strategy. In brief, a negative risk could have harmful effects on your project and a positive risk involves some positive effects and benefits for your project. Enhance risk response and exploit risk response are the two strategies for positive risks.
Table of Contents
The PMBOK® Guide specifies the below response strategies for positive and negative risks.
Positive Risk Response Strategies
• Enhance
• Exploit
• Accept
• Share
Negative Risk Response Strategies
• Mitigate
• Transfer
• Avoid
• Accept
As a project manager, to manage positive risks, you will try to increase the possibility of the risks happening. And to manage negative risks, you will try to decrease the possibility of the risks happening.
Risk response is a planning and decision making process to decide how to deal with each risk.
Exploit risk response strategy and enhance risk response strategy are widely used to manage identified project risks. Many professionals think that “Enhance” and “Exploit” are the same because in both cases you are trying to realize the opportunity. However, they are different. Let’s analyze both strategies in detail.
Enhance Risk Response
This risk response strategy analyzes the root cause of positive risk and tries to increase the probability and the positive impacts of it. The enhance risk response strategy can be defined as the opposite of the mitigation risk response strategy.
Enhance Risk Response Strategy Example
Let’s assume that you are managing a power plant project and you are required to complete the project in 24 months. You will get a bonus payment if you complete the project earlier as per the contract. But you are aware of the high cost of early completion thus, you decided to take a less aggressive approach to make the risk at least more probable to happen. Therefore you decided to motivate your project team and promise them a bonus fee for early completion.
Exploit Risk Response
In the exploit response strategy, you try to eliminate the uncertainty by making the opportunity absolutely happen.
The enhance risk response strategy can be defined as the opposite of the mitigation risk response strategy.
Exploit Risk Response Strategy Example
Let’s assume that you are managing a power plant project and you are required to complete the project in 24 months. You will get a bonus payment if you complete the project earlier as per the contract. Therefore, you decided to take a more aggressive approach to make the risk certainly happen. You decided to transfer your resources to this project form your other projects and you pay overtime to salaried employees in order to exploit this situation.
What is the Difference Between Enhance and Exploit Risk Response Strategies?
Enhance and Exploit are two positive risk response strategies. The main difference between them is; in the enhance strategy you are trying to increase the probability of the opportunity happening but in the exploit strategy you increase the probability of the opportunity to 100%. Another difference is that the enhanced risk response strategy can be thinkable as the opposite of the mitigation risk response strategy where the exploit risk response strategy can be thinkable as the opposite of the avoid risk response strategy.
In this article we analyzed the Enhance Risk Response vs Exploit Risk Response strategies by using examples. Note that this is an important topic for the PMI-RMP and PMP certification exam. You may encounter several questions related to positive and negative risk response strategies.
External References
Francois Simosa is the head of training for the Gragados Training Associates, which provides special project management and risk management training programs.
