How to reason about reliability risk

Teams often don’t handle reliability risks well. Reliability is tough to reason about. To have a reasonable response to reliability, we share an approach called a risk matrix, with a process to create plans to manage your reliability risks. A risk matrix is an approach teams and groups can use to help them reason about risk. They develop a list of the things they own, the dependencies they rely on, and a list of who relies on them. Then they systematically evaluate the amount of risk and impact of likely failures. And create plans to transfer, avoid, reduce, or accept each risk. This has been used across many organizations as a high leverage approach to improving reliability. A risk assessment framework This document presents one approach to risk assessment as part of an overall risk mitigation strategy. The process described here is intended to be used at the team level, and the examples reflect that. But it is readily adaptable to a group and organizational level when you begin to…