Managing OSS Transformation Risk

A reader of Mastering Your OSS recently reached out to indicate that he found Chapter 7 useful for understanding OSS-related risks and mitigations. He pointed out that this section encourages readers to contact us for a more comprehensive list of risks and risk management strategies. That’s right.

So here are the top-8 articles/pages on our website that discuss OSS/BSS project risk management:

Top 10 OSS project risks – a practical checklist of recurring risk themes you can baseline your own register against
Risk Register for OSS Projects – downloadable risk matrix template seeded with common OSS risks
Putting on the Big Black Hat: project pre-mortems – a pre-mortem technique to surface “unknown unknowns” early, before they become live issues
The Ultimate Framework for Planning Large-Scale OSS Transformations – the TPF approach to plan and coordinate complex transformations in a repeatable way, helping to identify key project activities (and potential omissions)
OSS Vendor Selection & Transformation Kick-off – principles for reducing “pitfall risk” during option reduction, procurement objectives and overspecification
Managing change on OSS projects – focuses on organisational change management as a primary risk driver, not a late-stage afterthought
Avoiding the Dead Zone – the OSS transformation accelerator – shows how lab, pilot and early integration/testing de-risk late-stage surprises
16 root causes of OSS problems – a root-cause lens (Toyota five-whys) for turning symptomatic risks into upstream preventative controls

If you’d like to really drill into the specifics of your OSS/BSS project, we also offer a paid course for Identifying and Mitigating Your Biggest OSS/BSS Risks. It includes a structured methodology (context, classification, treatment, monitoring) and the templates we use ourselves when building a risk register. You also get a one-hour workshop with one of our OSS risk management experts to do a deep-dive on the specifics of risk mitigation on your OSS/BSS project.

January 23, 2026
Ryan

If you found this article useful or valuable, subscribe (in the top-right corner of this page) and share. Let's spread the word and inspire more people to become passionate about OSS. Ryan is Passionate About OSS and has dedicated the last two decades to sharing his passion for OSS with the world. He is a founder, author, blogger, Engineer, connector and inquisitive learner about OSS and managing networks. To find out a little about his back-story and why he's so Passionate About OSS, click on the About Page. To connect with Ryan and the PAOSS team, click on the Contact page.

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