Risk Response Strategies
Planned actions to address risks, such as avoid, transfer, mitigate, or accept for threats.
Risk response planning assigns a deliberate strategy to each risk. For threats, PMBOK recognizes five strategies: avoid (eliminate the cause), transfer (shift financial impact to a third party, as with insurance or fixed-price contracts), mitigate (reduce probability or impact), escalate (hand off risks outside the project’s authority), and accept (passively, or actively with a contingency reserve). Opportunities have parallel strategies: exploit, share, enhance, escalate, and accept. A common trap confuses mitigate and transfer: mitigation reduces likelihood or severity but the project still owns the risk, whereas transfer moves the financial consequence elsewhere without removing it.
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