August 11th, 2007

Why risk management needs to start from us

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Billions of dollars lost in missed opportunities.

Thousands of projects that are never finished.

Only a few finished on time.

Countless hours of overtime just to notice that the project still was a failure, no matter how hard you tried.

Yet we still plan our every project for success. After one failed project we try to forget all about it and move on with the next one. “This time we cannot fail. We have learned from our mistakes.”, goes our reasoning.

But when the deadline once again passes without the product being finished, all we can say is “Oops, we did it again!”.

We didn’t think about the risks that were looming on the way. We never prepared for them. We didn’t even identify them! We were just counting on our technical experience - and to be honest - some amount of luck.

Why is risk management so hard?

Many books have been written about risk management, and in theory risk management is widely accepted as something worth doing.

But that’s just theory. Real life paints a different picture: Software developers who think it would be good to do risk management don’t have time to it, don’t feel like doing it, or aren’t allowed to do it.

While all of those excuses might be real, there is more to it. I’m the first to admit that to me risk management sounds like a dentist’s appointment: You know it’s good for you and that you should be doing it, but it’s not something you really want to do now when putting in all the cool new features sounds so much more interesting.

Today when reading Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects it hit me.

In the book Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister claim that:

Risk management is something that most of us practice all the time — everywhere except the office.

It was a good sentence so I read it again.

And again.

Then I started to think: “What if…”

What if it starts to go wrong already at this level? What if DeMarco and Lister are wrong and most of us don’t practice risk management even in our everyday lives?

These days we’re so surrounded with the message of positive thinking that it’s really easy to go off and dismiss all risk. Some even go as far as to say that we shouldn’t think about negative things at all.

But if we don’t plan for risks at home, how would we do it at work either?

It has to start from us

Let’s do a simple exercise.

Think about all the risks you are facing at home and your actions to identify them and prepare for them. Count how many of them you just try to ignore instead of actually handling. You might be surprised with the results.

Here’s a short list of risks to get you started:

  1. Fire: Do you have a fire alarm? Does it have a battery in it?
  2. Thunder: Do you unplug your electronic equipment during thunder storms? What about when you leave your home for a weekend?
  3. Unemployment: What will happen if you lose your job? Do you have a backup plan?
  4. Credit: What about if you don’t have enough money to pay for all your expenses?
  5. Car accident: Do you check your car tires, oil, fluids and so on to prevent your car from breaking on the road?
  6. Bicycle accident: Do you wear a helmet when driving your bike? Do you teach your kids to do the same?
  7. Sickness: Do you have a health insurance? Do you exercise to keep yourself healthy?

The list could go on forever. There are so many risks in our lives that we would like to simply ignore.

And if ignorance is the thing we choose in our everyday life as often as possible, how can we possibly be expected to take responsibility at our workplace?

That’s what risk management is all about: taking responsibility on your actions.

And it has to start from you. Not your boss, not your subordinates. You.

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