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Know Your Enemy: Software Risk Management

June 2, 2008 | Author: admin | Filed under: Risk Management, Project Management Definitions

Know Your Enemy: Software Risk Management
By Karl E. Wiegers

Software engineers are eternal optimists. When planning software projects, we often assume that everything will go exactly as planned. Or, we take the other extreme position: the creative nature of software development means we can never predict what’s going to happen, so what’s the point of making detailed plans? Both of these perspectives can lead to software surprises, when unexpected things happen that throw the project off track. In my experience, software surprises are never good news.

Risk management is becoming recognized as a best practice in the software industry for reducing the surprise factor. While we can never predict the future with certainty, we can apply structured risk management practices to peek over the horizon at the traps that might be looming, and take actions to minimize the likelihood or impact of these potential problems. Risk management means dealing with a concern before it becomes a crisis. This improves the chance of successful project completion and reduces the consequences of those risks that cannot be avoided.

What Is Risk?

A simple definition of a “risk” is a problem that could cause some loss or threaten the success of our project, but which hasn’t happened yet. (And we’d like to keep it that way.) These potential problems might have an adverse impact on the cost, schedule, or technical success of the project, the quality of our products, or team morale. Risk management is the process of identifying, addressing, and eliminating these potential problems before they can damage our project.

Whether we tackle them head-on or keep our heads in the sand, risks have a potentially huge impact on many aspects of our project. The tacit assumption that nothing unexpected will derail our project is simply not realistic. Our estimates should incorporate our best judgment about the potentially scary things that could happen on each project, and managers need to respect the assessments we make. Risk management is about discarding the rose-colored glasses and confronting the very real potential of undesirable events conspiring to throw our project off track.

Adapted from “Practical Project Initiation: A Handbook with Tools” (Microsoft Press, 2007), with permission from author.

Karl Wiegers, Ph.D., is Principal Consultant with Process Impact, a software process consulting and education company in Portland, Oregon. Karl’s most recent book is “Practical Project Initiation: A Handbook with Tools.” Karl is also the author of four other books and 170 articles. Karl is a frequent speaker at software conferences and professional society meetings. You can reach Karl through www.projectinitiation.com or www.processimpact.com.

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