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August 24, 2004

Waltzing with Bears: Part Deux

Having just finished reading Waltzing with Bears, I can heartily recommend it to everyone working in IT project teams. Although the book is primarily targeted at project managers, there is much to be gained from it's content by your common-or-garden-variety developer.

The main blurb on the back cover paraphrases the key point from the first chapter: "if there's no risk on your next project, don't do it". This phrase has an interesting double entendre-ish nature to it: the main point Demarco and Lister are trying to bring across is that projects devoid of risk are likely to be equally bereft of any real business value. As the authors put it - they (the projects) are losers! This is to emphasize the point that people should have a positive attitude towards managing the risks that exist on all worthwhile projects.

But the flipside to this phrase is the false positive project that is seemingly devoid of risk because risk management is not being done at all. And this is where the contents of this book are particularly useful to developers...

A few quick questions for all the fellow developers reading this post:

  • What knowledge do you have of the risk management processes used on your project?

  • Have you ever seen the risk list generated by the risk management process?

  • Is this list located in a position visible to the entire development team?

  • Is this list revisited/updated frequently throughout the course of the project (i.e., are the risks tracked?)

  • Do you know what happens to the estimates you provide to your project manager? Do your naturally optimistic figures get presented as schedule commitment dates to the stakeholders? Or does your PM use them as inputs to a risk model, thereby deriving a more realistic project schedule using a generated uncertainly diagram?

I suspect most developers out there are like me and cannot honestly say they have firm answers to any of those questions. In an ideal world project managers would take the responsibility of not implementing proper risk management procedures, thereby shielding us from the punitive consequences of their oversight. However, when you wake up and smell the Jolt, we all realise that the buck generally stops with us when unmanaged risks materialize in the face of our PMs. And the sound of that buck stopping is usually accompanied by long hours and short weekends as your project crosses into Death March County.

So, to mitigate the risk of your PM doing nothing to mitigate risks, take a butchers' at this succinct but densely-packed book and arm yourself with a swag of questions to annoy your PM with during your water-cooler conversation.

Posted by Andy Marks at August 24, 2004 07:36 PM

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