Most of the focus of risk management activities must lie in the early phases of a
program’s life cycle, because effective treatment of risk early in a program has the
highest payoff. It isn’t so that the later phases are not addressed anymore. Some
arguments for risk management activities in these phases are : first, there are still issues
which can be costly, and second, there is an important opportunity for lessons learned
from the actual outcomes of decisions based on uncertain information available in the
early phases that can provide a basis for improved risk management procedures in future.
When we look at the activities through time we see the following. In the early phases of
a program there is often very little information about the system being built or the
processes used to design, develop, manufacture, operate, and dispose (if applicable) of
the system. Effective risk management in that case must identify and bound the sources
of uncertainty in the analyses used to justify the program. As the program moves into
later development phases, attention must focus on timely and accurate reporting of
information related to risks to ensure that program management can limit the impacts of
the problems that actually develop. In the operations and support phase, there may be
additional data collection requirements to confirm the impacts generated from risk
tracked in the development phases. For a long term program, the risk management
procedures applied in the development phases might be applied during the operations and
support phase for the development of product improvement options, for use in other
projects.