Risk and Project Management
Whenever a disaster of major proportions occurs -like the one where British Petroleum’s oil platform is spilling thousands of gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico- people ask themselves, could anything have been done to prevent this?
As a Project Manager, I can say from experience that over 80% of risks are preventable. Now evidence of the Gulf of Mexico explosion shows that a $500K remote under-water emergency valve could have prevented this ecological disaster. These valves are mandatory in Norway and Brazil for under-water oil exploration but not in the US. Those $500K in savings now must seem ridiculous to BP which is facing over $6 Million dollars a day in cleanup costs, not to mention the damage to the affected areas in the Gulf.
What can we learn from this? First that we can not ignore Risk Management. It is a central part of successful projects. Second, mission-critical projects do require regulation, simply because too much is at stake when lives and environment are at risk.
For people in IT who are into Agile practices like Scrum is useful to remind ourselves that speed of execution is no replacement for risk management. We need to balance both of them to ensure success, we can’t just throw the PMBOK out the window. Ken Schwaber probably said it best:
…as organizations and projects flee the existing controls and safeguards of waterfall and predictive processes, they need to recognize the even higher degree of control, risk management, and transparency required to use Scrum successfully. I estimate that 75% of those organizations using Scrum will not succeed in getting the benefits that they hope for from it.
