14.8 Risk Aversion

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Creativity and flexibility are excellent traits for project managers to possess. The ability to think responsibly out of the box is helpful in resolving the various technical, logistical, and administrative challenges that are bound to crop up every now and again. The problem is that when you go down this road, you will probably step on someone else's toes. Here are two common examples of this.

A technical issue may require introducing a nonstandard product or vendor into your environment. This can upset product managers, vendor managers, or the operations people who are entrenched supporting Product A or Vendor B, when you and the team feel that using Product Y or Vendor Z is the only way out of the bind.
Typically, a project like yours would engage Mike's team to move customers. The problem is that Mike cannot meet your specific timeframes or technical specifications. The minute word gets to Mike that you are thinking about using someone else, he will feel his turf is being violated. He will probably go to your boss. If your supervisor is risk aversive, he is likely to insist that you use Mike, based on the boss' professed concern that nobody can do it as well as Mike. ^[4]

Other, similar scenarios can boil down to this. Thinking out of the box represents a change to business as usual (BAU) thinking and process. Your boss may fight you on this and insist that you follow BAU process, no matter how illogical, inconvenient, or inappropriate you sincerely believe this to be. Despite your protests that your solution is better than BAU, the riskaversive boss is thinking that if you eschew BAU and the alternate plan fails, the finger pointers will wonder aloud why you did not go with BAU. This is, of course, the old management philosophy known as: "Better the devil you know, than the devil you do not."

There is some truth in this because of the learning curve associated with any deviation from BAU. An alternate technology means new commands, possibly different vendors from a procurement or support perspective, and unknown quirks. Replacing Mike's implementation team with an alternative may require more work on your part, because Mike has keys to the freight elevators, knows all the security passwords, and has internal relationships unbeknownst to you that makes the job easier from an overall project management perspective.

Do your homework, make your case, and live with whatever decision is made. One of the conundrums of our business is juggling the passion for doing what is best for the project and living to lead another day.

^[4]Even if there is nothing special about Mike and his team.

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