Question

Develop realistic alternative courses of action, including roles, resources and results for moving closer to the ideal.

Answer 1

Ans. To develop realistic alternatives for the risks you have identified and analyzed. A major part of this is choosing among different risk management strategies.

Developing alternative courses of action requires understanding the technical and/or operational measures that can either break the cause and effect linkage to likelihood or reduce the consequences that would result if a given hazard or threat were to be experienced. While every situation is unique, input from a variety of subject matter experts using a variety of methods can be used. These include:

• Reviewing lessons learned from relevant past incidents
• Consulting subject matter experts, best practices, and government guidelines
• Brainstorming
• Modeling and simulation
• Engineering experiments and field trials

Evaluating identified potential alternative courses of action requires developing realistic estimates or projections of the overall costs for each alternative together with the associated benefits. Costs, in this context, include not just the monetary cost of a course of action but also other costs such as degradation of civil liberties, other adverse political impacts, opportunity costs (i.e., alternative uses of time and money not possible due to a given course of action), and so forth.

In general, the benefits of a risk management action will consist of the consequences (or harm) reduced or avoided. Some courses of action will impact or go hand-in-hand with others. For example, selecting one course of action may require selection of a complementary course or present requirements for investing in supporting infrastructure, training, etc. that may not be initially apparent, thus lending to the value of performing a thorough analysis. In doing cost and benefit analyses, the costs and benefits should be aggregated over the full life-cycle of the various courses of action. This is particularly important for options whose up-front costs are only a fraction of their full life-cycle costs.

Once the full costs and benefits of potentially viable courses of action have been prepared, decision-makers/risk managers can be presented with the full picture of assessed risk, alternative courses of action, the costs and benefits associated with each and, if the decision-maker/risk manager so chooses, recommendations on the best course of action.