OPS01-BP07 Manage benefits and risks - Operational Excellence Pillar
Implementation guidance

OPS01-BP07 Manage benefits and risks

Manage benefits and risks to make informed decisions when determining where to focus efforts. For example, it may be beneficial to deploy a workload with unresolved issues so that significant new features can be made available to customers. It may be possible to mitigate associated risks, or it may become unacceptable to allow a risk to remain, in which case you will take action to address the risk.

You might find that you want to emphasize a small subset of your priorities at some point in time. Use a balanced approach over the long term to ensure the development of needed capabilities and management of risk. Update your priorities as needs change

Common anti-patterns:

  • You have decided to include a library that does everything you need that one of your developers found on the internet. You have not evaluated the risks of adopting this library from an unknown source and do not know if it contains vulnerabilities or malicious code.

  • You have decided to develop and deploy a new feature instead of fixing an existing issue. You have not evaluated the risks of leaving the issue in place until the feature is deployed and do not know what the impact will be on your customers.

  • You have decided to not deploy a feature frequently requested by customers because of unspecified concerns from your compliance team.

Benefits of establishing this best practice: Identifying the available benefits of your choices, and being aware of the risks to your organization, helps you to make informed decisions.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: Low

Implementation guidance

  • Manage benefits and risks: Balance the benefits of decisions against the risks involved.

    • Identify benefits: Identify benefits based on business goals, needs, and priorities. Examples include time-to-market, security, reliability, performance, and cost.

    • Identify risks: Identify risks based on business goals, needs, and priorities. Examples include time-to-market, security, reliability, performance, and cost.

    • Assess benefits against risks and make informed decisions: Determine the impact of benefits and risks based on goals, needs, and priorities of your key stakeholders, including business, development, and operations. Evaluate the value of the benefit against the probability of the risk being realized and the cost of its impact. For example, emphasizing speed-to-market over reliability might provide competitive advantage. However, it may result in reduced uptime if there are reliability issues.