Case Study: Indentifying Risks

The shipping and mailing company in India has national IT infrastructure with 600,000 employees and thousands of facilities across the country. However, it was facing some difficulties in updating and advancing its personnel security policy. The company was in desperate need to create a personnel security policy to establish a framework for identification and classification of risks, associated with employee positions. The company's personnel security policy was not refreshed to reflect the current accepted standards. This made the company to remain unaware of the current and comprehensive list of project risks. Management decided to determine the appropriate level of risk investigation for each task.

Vume, one of the leading professional service organizations in India, delivers consulting and financial advisory services through its member firms. This organization helped Personnel Security Project Management Office (PMO) to develop scoring tool to calculate required background investigation of risk and help working groups to resolve discrepancies.

This scoring tool was used by the shipping and mailing company, which helped to create a baseline list of all possible project risks and designate them as low-risk, medium-risk, or high-risk. The project members were easily able to detect the position of high-level risks and investigate them in order to mitigate risk. The Vhume organization also presented this company with several solutions on how to identify and mitigate the project risks.

Questions:

1. What were the problems faced by the shipping and mailing company? Can you categorize these risks?
2. How did Vume organization help the shipping and mailing company to identify and mitigate the project risks?

Case Study: Types of Risks

Everyone knows Microsoft, a well-known software company which develop a wide range of software product for various computing devices. It develops operating system for servers, server application for client/server environment, business solution applications and software development tools. The major business segments of this company include Desktop and Enterprise Software and Services, and Devices and Consumer Commerce Investments.

As technology was rapidly changing, the company was facing many underlying risks. With this advancement in technology, Microsoft shifted from PC-based applications to Web-based application converting its proprietary software to open source software. Thus Microsoft faced many powerful competitors which include IBM, Sun Microsystems and Oracle. 

The major areas of risks were:

• Technology risks: Managing new technology was very critical activity as it had cost them much more than their expected budget.

• Operational risks: Piracy was high on track, where software were easily copied on to a medium such as Compact Disc or moved electronically. Maintaining security and quality was a challenge for Microsoft.

• Intellectual property risks: Copying of risk caused significant loss to company's revenue.

Microsoft managed technology risks through internal development which gave freedom to identify which modification is most important and can be implemented. To deal with operational risks, Microsoft decided to send out the product update release or make it open source to correct this problem. Microsoft educated its customer on benefits of using licensed products and created awareness among lawmakers to develop environment where these rights are adequately protected.

Questions:

      1. What were the risks encountered by the Microsoft?

2.  How did Microsoft overcome the risks related to technology and operations?