RiskRide tutorial
A few weeks ago, i’ve published a new dApp: RiskRide. The major aim of this dApp is to provide a business process that allows projects (or other efforts in general) to perform a solid risk management process.
Here, the idea is to create this risk management process as a distributed process in which knowledgable stakeholders of the project (or effort :) ) can participate with their current perspective towards the risk of the project (i’ll skip the general effort part here, i hope it is obvious throughout this tutorial). This follows a bit the idea of the “Wisdom of the Crowd” approach, which believes that decisions that are taken by a larger amount of people can be better than decisions taken by single experts. Although RiskRide does not targeting really huge groups of people, the idea is that a group of experts / knowledgable stakeholders will finally create better decisions as a single expert.
Basically, the necessary process has five different steps:
- Creation of a project
- Adding risks
- Consolidating risks
- Evaluation of the consolidated risks
- Gathering results
The rest of this tutorial will guide you through each of those steps by a small example, a risks assessment of the Waves Platform itself. It is important to state here that the mentioned risks and their corresponding evaluations are to be understood as examples and do in particular not reflect the position of the author of this tutorial towards the Waves Platform!
Create a project
Going to the starting page of RiskRide, you will directly land on the page for the creation of a new project:
As shown in Figure 1, while creating a new project, a name for the project and a short description of the project need to be provided. Additionally, via the Add Address button, addresses can be added to the project which are later on allowed to work within the project, e.g., add new risks, consolidate risks and / or evaluate risks. These addresses mainly correspond to users working in the system and need therefore be gathered upfront by the user who creates the project.
Once all these setting (name, description and addresses) are defined, the Create Project button can be pressed. After pressing the button, the user needs to approve the corresponding transactions necessary for the creation of the project in the blockchain via Waves Keeper, as shown in Figure 2.
After the project is successfully created, a Waves address is generated for the new project, as shown in Figure 3.
This address (here: 3PA4M9onAcYaCqNMLhrfcau8oG7AxTuuiFR) is very important for the all other steps that will be described in this tutorial. It should therefore be noted and distributed to the users that should participate in the evaluation.
Adding risks
Once the project is successfully created, risks can be added by all users whos addresses have been registered with the project during the project creation phase. Those users therefore need to go to the Add Risks page. After entering the projects Waves address, new risks can be added by hitting the Add Risk button, as shown in Figure 4:
Each of the newly added risks need to have a name and a short description. Risks can (and should) be added by each user wich registered addresses for the project.
In this step each user defines what risks he currently sees in general for the project.
Finally, the added risks need to be stored on the blockchain from each participant by hitting the Store Risks button.
Consolidation of risks
The consolidation of risks serves a number of different uses cases and is possible via the Consolidate Risks page. After entering the address of the current project, all risks collected from the different participants are shown, including their corresponding names and descriptions, as shown in Figure 5:
Here it is either possible to edit both the name and / or the description of a certain risks, but also to delete risks, e.g., in case that two users have reported similar risks, and to also add new risks that may arise in the discussion. This phase of risk consolidation is mainly meant to either be performed in a Face-2-Face meeting with all participants, e.g., by meeting personally or via a Skype session; or it could be done by a selected member of the team, in cases in which the participants are not able to meet, neither personally nor virtually.
Again, the consolidated lists of risks need to be stored on the blockchain by hitting the Store Consolidated Risks button.
Evaluation of Risks
After the successful consolidation of the risks, all participants are asked to evaluate the consolidated risks. Therefore, each user of the process needs to enter the Evaluate Risks page of RiskRide and again enter the Waves address of the current project. As shown in Figure 6, the risks of the corresponding list of consolidated risks are shown.
Here the users are asked to evaluate the risks in two dimensions:
- Probability: each user defines the probability that the corresponding risk actually happens on a scale from 0–100 (will sure not happen — will sure happen).
- Impact: each user defines his perspective of the impact this risk would have on the project if it happens on a scale from 0–5 (no impact at all — tremendous impact)
This step needs to be performed by each user. This is basically the step in which the users evaluate the importance of a risk, given their current perspective on the project. An example of such an evaluation can be seen in Figure 7:
Finally, each user has to store his evaluations by hitting the Store Evaluations button.
Gathering results
Finally, after all users have evaluated the risks, the results of the analysis can be shown on the Show Results page. After entering the projects Waves address again, the results of the evaluation could be seen, as shown in Figure 8:
Therefore, the result shows that, based on the judgement of the involved specialists, the two major risks currently are that the Community looses trust and Marketing. Both have a high probability (marketing an even higher probability compared to the community loosing trust) as well as at the same time a high impact on the project.
Based on this risk assessment, counter measures could be taken against the most pressing risks and an additional risk assessment after taking those countermeasures can show if the counter measures have been successful or not.
By this, a repetitive risk assessment, together with taking corresponding counter measures, provides a very (pro-)active risk management process.