By “Project” I’m referring to software development projects run by IT departments. It is staggering how much trouble they run in to and how few are cleanly successful. By successful I mean that the project delivers its finished product on time, on budget with the features requests by the customer. Almost no projects meat this criteria of success. People bend and stretch things around in order to place the label of success on a project. To a degree this is fine because if something is delivered you do have some success.
The problem with this bending and stretching is that we lose the lessons the project could have taught us. Instead of learning to collect and clearly define the project’s requirements up front, we bend and shift things around so we learn nothing.
We also lose risk management which I think is a practice that could help projects be more successful. A lot has already been written about risk management. Actually, a lot has been written about a lot of stuff. It just happens that few people bother to read the stuff and then put it in to effective practice.
How does risk management fit in to project success? Or more specifically, how does risk management help you be more successful? It helps you learn to predict the future of a project.
When you first start doing risk management you’ll struggle identifying risks. No problem. Document the issues your project runs in to. Things like – bugs in production, changing requirements, change in management, loss of a key team member. Then generalize the issue to cover a boarder area – a specific bug in a project is unlikely to show up in a future project, but bugs in general will.
When you get to your next project pull out the document you started and you’ll have the beginnings of this project’s risks. Keep updating your document. Depending upon how you work it won’t take long to have an excellent repository to draw on.
You’ll also be surprised at how often the same risks and issues keep showing up over and over. Luckily because you have the document you’ll remember. You’ll also know what to do about these problems to keep them from sinking your project.