Handling known risks (and something about matching expectations)

Last time I promised to try to stay out of the traffic metaphors, and I shall do so...almost.

As business analyst we are used to working with risk analysis and risk mitigation.

Thus it makes me wonder how almost everyone, myself excluded of course, gets surprised by frost and snow here in Denmark. By everyone I do mean everyone from individuals to large government controlled companies.

It is a known statistically proven fact that sometime in November or December, even with global warming and all, the first frost and/or snow will appear. Nevertheless it always seems to catch a rather large group by complete surprise.

(On a side note it is rather the irony of destiny that it is snowing in Copenhagen during the COP15 summit)

In our projects we usually identify risk a plan mitigating actions according to risk size etc. Somehow we fail to do the same to a risk that is almost sure to occur at the same time every year.

In the current case of snow and frost mitigation actions are of course to to fit the appropriate tires to the car, make sure the cooling fluid is frost resistant etc. and should this not be enough be sure to keep blankets and drinking water in the car.
How the train operators prepare I'm not sure, but it is often not that effective, or rather it is probably a cost benefit consideration/decision.

To project this to our project world, do we have similar risk that we can almost guarantee will occur at a specific time in a projects life cycle?
I think so, examples could be the ability to gathered the user requirements on the scheduled time, testing takes longer than planned and probably many others.

Do we not have the mitigation in place? Sure, add more time! Cut functionality! Cut on Quality! But that is however not always the option, as this now gets political and I will not go into that here.

But the least we can do is mach the expectations of action from all involved parties. If a risk is high enough, and we are more or less sure that it will occur, then we must at least trust that we take the agreed action.

If we can agree on who does what, we might have a chance to at least softening the blow a bit, and not get knocked off course, just like the traffic on the slippery road.

Some interesting articels

This is just a little intermezzo, with a few links to articles I think give some good advise.


Creating Compelling Executive Summaries in Seven Easy Steps - from Business Analyst Times

10 Ways to explain things more Effectively - also from Business Analyst Times

And finally I would suggest you visit the site www.batimes.com There are plenty of good articles and blogs, and if you don't want to search for them, just subscribe to the newsletter :-]