Risk, Judgement and Mitigation #2

[swatts]

Go look at part 1 for the video if you want to understand the context.

First of we had a little game of Risk Bingo, here's the ones that I identified.

Extra Risks: Customer, Hardware (Delay), Unrealistic Requirements, Complexity, 3rd Party.

These can be grouped into

• Financial
• Organisational
• Technical
• Resource
• Communication

I then briefly discussed quantifying risks, it doesn't matter how as long as you do it consistently.

Next Outcomes Bingo

Extra Outcomes: Failure of Project, Cost to the Environment.

We use our judgement to come up with ways of mitigating our identified risks.

Extra Mitigation: Honest Communication, Identify, Refuse Project, Plan for Failure

Ways of mitigating risk fall into 4 techniques.

Technical Debt is the mitigation of technical risk. i.e it is the effort (technical assets) you put in place to manage identified technical risks. And that was a nice link to Fabs presentation, article found here.

Here's some techniques we use....

Have a risk column in our requirements document (1-5)

Make our software highly configurable (removing specific decisions)

Push Risk forward by offering up working code ASAP (concentrating on identified risk areas).

A risk can be considered a potential problem, the moment it moves from potential to real is the risk trigger event point. Catching these early allows the mitigation to be applied early.

And the final word is complicating factors, proper risk management may well lose you work. Sometimes you just have to be willing to take the risk.

But at least your eyes will be open

Lots of Love

Steve

The bingo game code is attached (LV2015), fun for a very small percentage of an unusual family.