What are the Response Strategies for Opportunities?

Answer 1

ust like in the case of threats, you have three strategies to deal with opportunities. Not surprisingly, each response strategy to deal with an opportunity is a counterpart of a response strategy to deal with a threat; a one-to-one correspondence:

• Share corresponds to transfer

• Exploit corresponds to avoid

• Enhance corresponds to mitigate

You use the SEE (Share, Exploit, Enhance) approach to deal with opportunities presented by the positive risks.

Share - Sharing a positive risk that presents an opportunity means transferring ownership of the risk to another party that is better equipped to capitalize on the opportunity. Some examples of sharing are:

• Forming risk-sharing partnerships

• Starting a joint venture with the purpose of capitalizing on an opportunity

• Forming teams or special-purpose companies to exploit opportunities presented by positive risks

Exploit - Exploiting an opportunity means ensuring that the opportunity is realized; that is, the positive risk that presents the opportunity does occur. This is accomplished by eliminating or minimizing the uncertainty associated with the risk occurrence. An example of exploiting is assigning more talented resources to the project to reduce the completion time and therefore to be the first to market. Another example could be to provide better quality than planned to beat a competitor. Whereas exploiting refers to ensuring that the positive risk occurs.

Enhance - This strategy means increasing the size of the opportunity by increasing the probability, impact, or both. You can increase the probability by maximizing the key drivers of the positive risks or by strengthening the causes of the risks. Similarly, you can increase the impact by increasing the project's susceptibility to the positive risk.