5.5 Murphy s Law

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5.5 Murphy's Law

Now that the process of identifying risk has been put into context, it is time to look at how you go about sniffing out these potential sore points in your project. Risk can be driven by the nature of your project, by your environment, or by the technology you are delivering. Risk can also come out of left field, as the stolen computer shipment proves. The September 11, 2001 tragedy hurt my project in several ways, some of which took months of recovery. Mother Nature chips in every now and then, too, such as the time I experienced a painful delay when a crucial shipment could not leave an airport socked in by a hurricane.

Having said all this, however, should not cause great alarm or a defeatist attitude. Being prepared to deal with risk is a state of mind. You know that troubling events or conditions are bound to emerge on big projects, and you want to be ready for them. This state of readiness includes crisp anticipation, reacting with alacrity, and having the confidence that you and your team will do the right thing, even if you have to think outside the box (i.e., get creative big time).

The key is to understand your exposures. No one, apparently, was in the position to predict the murderous destruction at the World Trade Center and the obstacles it immediately presented to those of us who were working projects in or proximate to that killing field. ^[2] As a professional worrywart, I have since added loss of existing land-based and wireless telecommunications as well as physical access to buildings and their computing devices as risks to investigate on all future projects. Downtown Manhattan was a mess for weeks after September 11. It is amazing how well thousands of technicians and engineers performed in those terrible days.

As stated, there are risks specific to the technologies. Their discovery was addressed in Chapter 3. In addition, I have a process for mining projects for risk. What I am doing, of course, is looking for things that could break. I go about this by asking "What if?" questions of myself and everyone else associated with the project. Risk has already been divided into the three classes of project, beneficiaries, and the corporation, so let us cycle through the categories before moving on to the next steps.

^[2]All of us were far more devastated by the loss of life and property, but that is another story.

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