Prevention and the Missing Question

Hope is great. It keeps us all going. At the same time, hoping for a good outcome can lead us to trouble. Most of us have hoped and lost. Many mistakes have happened.

The fuel tank is on the red line, but we drive past the filling station, because we know there’s a cheaper one a few kilometres down the road. This happens to be the one time the fuel gauge is a little bit out of calibration and we run dry. Since it’s a diesel car, it’s not just a long walk with a fuel can. We need to pay a specialist to bleed the system before adding fuel.

Our computer system is stuck. Again. We go ahead and reboot. It has worked the last many times. This time however we don’t recover. The outage lasts 8 hours. We and our customers are rightly distressed. It matters little that the issue is traced to a failing, eventually failed hardware component.

The backup network is supposed to sustain service. Unfortunately, it has been taken down for a power supply upgrade just at the moment the primary system runs into trouble.

The missing question?

“When we do this, what could go wrong?”

Theoretically, this is part of daily life for change managers, project managers, SREs and anyone involved with maintaining business critical systems and processes. It’s hard-wired into the heads of every health and safety professional in the world.

And yet..

When I ask groups of people what proportion of failures, incidents, nonconformances, errors, mistakes and crashes could and should have been prevented, the vast majority of people answer: “At least half.”

“When we do this, what could go wrong?” deserves to be in daily life. And if it already is, double it.

If you need ways to make this so, you could try the KT Risk Simulation to sharpen your colleagues’ senses. https://www.kepner-tregoe.com/lp/risk-mitigation-simulation/

And there are some great resources at #ITSMFUK to help you with Problem Management.