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Mitigations

Mitigations​

Here are a selection of mitigations for Scarcity Risk in general:

  • Buffers: smoothing out peaks and troughs in utilisation.
  • Reservation Systems: giving clients information ahead of the dependency usage about whether the resource will be available to them.
  • Graceful degradation: ensuring some service in the event of over-subscription. It would be no use allowing people to cram onto the bus until it can't move.
  • Demand Management: having different prices during busy periods helps to reduce demand. Having "first class" seats means that higher-paying clients can get service even when the train is full. Uber adjust prices in real-time by so-called Surge Pricing. This is basically turning Scarcity Risk into a Market Risk problem.
  • Queues: these provide a "fair" way of dealing with scarcity by exposing some mechanism for prioritising use of the resource. Buses operate a first-come-first-served system, whereas emergency departments in hospitals triage according to need.
  • Pools: reserving parts of a resource for a group of customers, and sharing within that group.
  • Horizontal Scaling: allowing a scarce resource to flexibly scale according to how much demand there is. (For example, putting on extra buses when the trains are on strike, or opening extra check-outs at the supermarket.)

Much like Reliability Risk, there is science for it:

  • Queue Theory is all about building mathematical models of buffers, queues, pools and so forth.
  • Logistics is the practical organisation of the flows of materials and goods around things like Supply Chains,
  • and Project Management is in large part about ensuring the right resources are available at the right times.

In this section, we've looked at various risks to do with scarcity of time, as a quantity we can spend like money. But frequently, we have a dependency on a specific event. On to Deadline Risk.