Risk management and allocation is a big issue for virtual teams. What if something goes wrong? How can you mitigate risk? How would overall team risk be managed and/or allocated in a virtual team vs. a team with a traditional legal structure? Subcontracts are cumbersome. Are there standard "risk-sharing" contracts between participants that could emerge? How about insurance products?

In terms of risk management and mitigation with a traditional team structure, this always works, where the team usually maintains via the portal, Project Documentations that include deliverables as well as issues/risk spreadsheets detaling the business implications and level of severity of risks, mitigation action being taken against each identified risk. Similar approach could also be taken with virtual teams, however every team member needs to maintain and comunicate as soonas the risk is identified with the parties responsible for solutioning and thus mitigating these risks.

Typical standard risk-sharing contracts usually dealing with sub-contractors have to be definied specifically indicatin gthe specialised skill set that would be at risk if this sub-sontractor failed to deliver for any reason. In such scenarios the contract should highlight the overall business environments for handling the situation and also bear portion of non-performance and the implications of non-delivery of the project on time and within budget with the subcontractor with text that indicates the contract is subject to review and sub-contractor even subject to dismissal is such a risk is shared. I have seen this prevalant in a lost of contracts of systems implementations in the middle east indusries.

Again insurance products are such diverse that after separating the common factors, the contract should be made specifically for the indistry that business is dealing with. Hope this helps, Thanks.