Risk and Mission Success
Today’s business, project, and operational environments are becoming increasingly complex. People often struggle to make sense of this complexity, which places many critical projects and processes at risk of failing. Organizations typically manage several types of risk using traditional approaches, including project risk, security risk, technology risk, and operational risk. Each type of risk is differentiated by the unique sources, or causes, that produce it. Normally, responsibility for managing different types of risks is assigned to different groups within an organization.
Because each type of risk is normally managed in isolation, it is difficult to establish the overall success potential of a project or process using traditional risk-management approaches. Since different groups in an organization have responsibility for managing different types of risk, each group tends to locally optimize its mitigation efforts. No one is responsible for consolidating disparate risk data. As a result, the overall chances for success are not explicitly determined.Mission-Oriented Success Analysis and Improvement Criteria
SEI Mission-Oriented Success Analysis and Improvement Criteria (MOSAIC) is a management approach for establishing and maintaining confidence that objectives will be achieved successfully. It comprises a suite of risk-based methods for assessing and managing complex projects and processes. This success-oriented philosophy requires managers to focus their attention on managing the result, or outcome, of a project or process. The goal is to ensure that the eventual outcome fulfills the objectives being pursued. Traditional risk-management approaches generate a set of risks for a project or process. Each risk in the set is a cause-effect pair that conveys the potential consequence triggered by a single condition or event. In contrast, MOSAIC focuses on the desired outcome (i.e., the objectives being pursued) and examines the range of conditions and potential events that influence the chances of achieving the desired outcome.
With its highly-flexible approach, MOSAIC can be applied across the life cycle and used to manage projects and processes that cross organizational boundaries. It is designed to help people analyze tradeoffs and make better decisions in situations that have a high degree of uncertainty. Using the MOSAIC approach you can:
- determine objectives
- define what constitutes success
- forecast the potential for success
- measure health status at any given point in time
- develop strategies to keep from failing
Since these tools are designed to analyze complex organizational and technological issues that are well beyond the capabilities of most traditional risk analysis approaches, MOSAIC is well-suited for use in a variety of complex environments, such as
- large, distributed software development programs
- organizations in dynamic, rapidly changing business environments
- organizations with strict reliability, security, and safety requirements
- large, distributed supply chains
- processes supporting critical infrastructures
- distributed information-technology (IT) processes
For detailed information, visit the Mission Success in Complex Environments website.
For More Information
Send comments or questions to:
Customer Relations
Software Engineering Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
4500 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890
Phone: 412-268-5800
E-mail: customer-relations@sei.cmu.edu
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