Itamar Gilad, of ex-Google fame, has an excellent post – The Tool that Will Help You Choose Better Product Ideas – which describes a process for selecting better product ideas and implementing them with confidence, minimizing the risks and maximizing the team efficiency.
Unlike many other similar posts, this one is very practical, detailed, and relies on iterations, feedback, communications, and ties together different roles within the company or the team.
O’Reilly runs a nice and simple article on what is risk management. They look at it from the perspective of a web application, but the suggestions are generic enough to be applied universally. The highlights are:
I particularly liked this paragraph from the identifying risks section:
You will likely find that there are obvious entries in the list, but there should also be entries that surprise you. This is good. You want to uncover as many of your risk vulnerabilities as possible, and if some of them don’t come as a surprise to you, you probably haven’t dug deep enough.