As we discussed earlier, an FMEA is a tool that helps you identify potential issues within your project. Once you have completed the process, identified the risks, it is time to mitigate those risks and perform a final RPN score refresh to see if you have achieved your objectives.

The FMEA process allows you to identify and mitigate risks. Communicating the FMEA results and driving real action to reduce risk is critical. This article discusses the communication process to ensure your risk mitigation plans are accepted by key stakeholders.

In this article we will discuss how to mitigate project/process risks and lower your FMEA RPN Score. Properly done, it can be an invaluable tool to help mitigate risks early on in a project or help fix an existing process.

- RPN scoring allows you to quantify the risk of a failure mode. If you can pinpoint your biggest risks early on, you can prioritize their mitigation and mitigate them before process go-live. This will benefit your program later on down the line because it ensures that all efforts are focused on the most important issues, rather than being spread across all possible issues.

- RPN scoring is also a way to measure how effective your mitigation strategies have been at reducing risk during development. You will be able to tell if a particular strategy has helped with reducing risk, or if it has not been effective at all (or if there was no need for implementing this type of strategy in the first place).

All good managers know that there are risks in everyday business. Projects can turn south, processes can break. But can you identify those risks and the impact to your business? These posts will cover a fundamental tool used by project managers and Six Sigma professionals to identify risks, quantify the impact, and brainstorm how to mitigate those potentially nasty results. FMEA stands for Failure Modes and Effects Analysis. It's a simple tool and methodology to help guide ensure you have your bases covered and that risks are clearly understood by everyone. Let's dive in!