Risk management
Experience of database development in many countries indicates, however, that there will likely be several difficulties encountered along the way. Risks to projects can generally be of technical, managerial, commercial, or external nature and may result in either positive or negative outcomes.
Strategies to cope with negative risks include escalating, avoiding, transferring, mitigating or simply accepting the risk. To escalate a risk entails passing it up in an organization. Some risks may be avoided, e.g. through the implementation of suitable measures to ensure that it does not occur in the first place. Transferring means to share the risk with a third party, e.g. by purchasing an insurance. Mitigation measures reduce the probability or impact of a risk to an acceptable level. Finally, in some cases, the best strategy might be to accept the risk and instead focus on creating contingency and/or fallback plans, accordingly.
More detail about the risks can be found in the table below. This overview summarizes some typical risks associated with initiatives for LCA database development, along with examples of possible ways to manage these risks to avoid situations that might stall the database development process.
