A plea for risk based project management

In 33 years as a professional computer scientist, I have been involved in a lot of failed projects. Fortunately, I have also been part of a lot of highly successful projects. I like to pay attention to the difference.

Since my mind is compulsively analytical, I am not satisfied with a hundred positive and negative examples. I need to tease out the commonality. What makes a great project? What makes a great manager? What makes a highly productive and cohesive team? I need to know the rule, not just refer to examples.

The single biggest factor in all the failures which I took part in was the absence of a risk based approach to management. You can have all the other bases covered, but if you don't have a risk analysis, and a plan to address all the high-risk/high-impact issues, you don't have a plan.

You can have staffing, funding, an idea, and marketing plans all complete. If you haven't looked at risk and your project succeeds, you were just lucky.

Before I started Not a Recipe Software, I went through all the high-risk/high-impact items I could think of and addressed every one. That doesn't mean I built the solution. It means I had a concrete feasible plan to solve the problem presented by the risk, in a timely fashion. Then I asked friends to poke holes at it and addressed any issues they could find.

There are no high-risk/high-impact issues in my project plan. Why? Because before I even made a plan, I had addressed them. Now that I have Jira up and running, any issues identified will be promptly recorded and addressed. My goal is that no high-risk/high-impact issues exist on any kanban board for more than 24 hours. If I can't address it immediately, I will break it down and find the appropriate resources to address it promptly.

This isn't hard. It is just a dimension of project planning that is critical to consider. If your risk analysis and management plan is absent then the rest of your plans have the following impact:

• The staffing plan lists the people whose time you risk wasting, and how you will waste it
• The budget details the money you risk losing, and how you will lose it
• The team Confluence page and Jira history will become a great case study to do better next time...stay positive.

Projects fail for many reasons. People are complex, organisations are even more complex, and projects more complex still. There's no need to mourne and point fingers when you are involved in a failed project. It is best to acknowledge it and learn from it.

In hindsight, there will always be a fatal risk that kills any failed project. Figure out what it was, and add it to your risk checklist for the next time. After enough failures, anyone can look like a genius!