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Unexpected problems on projects cause the most disruption
“Life is not what you expect: it is made up of the most unexpected twists and turns” — Ilaiyaraaja
Projects are fertile breeding grounds for problems. Ingredients such as groups of people working to tight deadlines, using new technology/features with no experience and lots of activities happening at the same time.
Some problems go off like a hand grenade, grab everyone’s attention and demand to be resolved quickly. Other problems hide in the background, sleeping, and then when everyone is looking the other way they unexpectedly cause enormous problems.
What’s the unexpected risk that will disrupt your project?
Like being hit by a car you didn’t see, the surprise doesn’t give you time to plan or react.
The Fifth Risk
In Michael Lewis’s book the The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democract it puts forward the idea president trump is a risk manager and the government official who works in the many departments manages risk.
Lewis interviews government officials in roles such as the department of energy and asks them for their top five risks. Most people can reel of four risks quickly but when they get to the fifth, they struggle and have to do more thinking. Lewis highlights this
“And I thought, that’s the fifth. The risk you’re attending to, the risk that’s top of mind, is not likely the thing that’s going to actually kill you. The fifth risk is a scary one because it’s the thing you’re not paying attention to.”
The fifth risk is a long-term risk that with gradual mismanagement could grow into a large problem. What are the risks you aren’t expecting, what’s my fifth risk on the projects and work.
Example
It works, it works, it works, then boom it doesn’t work. these problems cosy up close to you causing you to let your guard down before they go wrong with devastating effect. No one saw the big problem until it exploded.
I have seen many ignored problems suddenly turn into a large problem. A project left on debugging on a Dynamics server, every day it would log out hundreds of lines of…
