This week, we discussed risk mitigation. The lecture for this week stated that one of the things that can help to mitigate risk in a project was product testing. Thinking about this week's lecture, consider the following scenario and respond to the prompts below:

You are a project manager who primarily works on telecommunication projects for major retail businesses. You have just been hired by a large department store chain that wants a new conference call system for its corporate headquarters. One of the primarily deliverables that the company gives you is to provide quality speakers for its main conference room and its secondary conference room. The main conference room is larger than the secondary one. However, the company did not specify if both rooms should have the same size speakers, or if the bigger room will require bigger speakers. As the project manager, you would like to test multiple speaker types in both rooms in order to eliminate the risks of installing the wrong speakers. However, the company is reluctant to do any product tests because it believes that product testing will delay project completion.

Explain how the project manager should handle this situation by answering the following prompts:

• Provide a brief explanation of the importance of product testing and how it mitigates risk.
• List 2-3 strategies that can be used to communicate the risks associated with installing the speakers without testing them first.
• Explain how could convince the company that product testing will not delay project completion.