Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

Tag: risk management

  • Risk Management in Small Teams

    I was taught risk management the classic way. You know, risk log, voting for probability and impact, finding out which risks are the most painful, deciding on mitigation plan, discussing results etc.

    A cool thing in this old-school process is that it activates different members of the team. Even those, who wouldn’t be asked otherwise. Even those, who would tell you that the project is doomed unless you decide to do something about that performance issue found last month.

    At the same time in small teams this kind of process looks like complete overkill. In small teams which deal with small chunks of work knowledge about risks (about everything actually) is often commonly shared. The problem isn’t about bringing individual opinions to the table. The problem is to make risk management as simple as possible yet still effective.

    An easy and powerful approach here is to forget that there is something like risk management at all. At least to the point where you don’t consider having dedicated formal process to do risk management. Instead you incorporate risk management to everyday tasks: stand-ups, retrospectives, demos, planning meetings etc. You discuss potential risks every time you discuss a task or story. You discuss potential risks whenever you feel about it.

    You won’t even need a risk log. If you talk about risks at every occasion you quickly learn how to catch those which may become painful (filtering by type) and those which are likely to hit you (filtering by frequency of mentioning).

    When you keep talking about risks all the time people learn to deal with them naturally as they work on their tasks. Potential performance problem Luke mentioned yesterday? I’ll run some stress tests as I just have a while and maybe Mike would take a look at database as he’s already tweaking it to build that new feature. The trick is we don’t call it a risk. It is just a performance issue. Possible performance issue actually. Luke just thought it might become a problem but in a couple of days the problem will be gone, this way or another. And you don’t need to use the word risk, have a risk log, perform risk assessment, build and implement mitigation plans etc.

    The only thing you need to have this kind risk management in place is a bit of trust and open atmosphere. Oh, co-location and no-meeting culture may help as well but in small teams both are usually in place already.

  • A Failure Is an Option

    One of my ex-CEOs told me once a story about situation he’d have to face when he’d been a newbie manager. Shortening the story (it’s dull anyway, you can just skip it) a bit there was serious hardware malfunction in a company. There were no spare parts on service stock and they were to deliver their services next day, which was impossible to do without working hardware. The manager felt he had to do something to get machines working again. Unfortunately there was virtually no chance for him to succeed. Company failed to meet their deadlines and he felt as it was partially his fault, which wasn’t true.

    The moral of the story is:

    A failure is an option. Face it.

    By the way I’ve heard the story just after I finally rescued a project after 80-hour over-weekend battle with short brakes to get some sleep. Yes, it sounded totally irrelevant, but what would you expect from CEOs in that matter anyway?

    The moral however is very wise. A failure is an option. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how hard you try there are objective obstacles you can’t deal with. It can happen even if you’re the greatest Project Management Superhero in the galaxy and the biggest projects eat from your hand.

    If you ask me what to do, well, you won’t be surprised with the answer – prepare yourself. Sure, you can sit and cry your eyes out but you won’t get The Most Creative PM Technique Prize for that.

    First thing is to acknowledge you can fail. To be honest most of managers don’t get through this one. You know, you need to tell your ego you’re not as perfect as you think. That’s a tough task. Especially if your ego is so big it goes 5 meters ahead of you.

    Second, to have clean conscience, make sure you did everything you could to avoid failure before giving up. After all you’d prefer to be fairly sure you couldn’t make it, right?

    Third, prepare rescue plan. When you’re finished with hitting the wall hard with your head, have a plan how to call for an ambulance. It was said already that crying over spilled milk or crushed head isn’t the best idea in the world.

    I always smile whenever the reaction for question about potential problem is “we’ll manage, we’re superheroes, don’t ask” kind of approach. And believe me I see that a lot recently. I should have several great stories to tell soon.