We're working on a White Paper for the Joint Space Cost Council which is an organization composed of government (NRO, NASA, USAF, and others) and industry representatives with an interest in space. Our topic is Increasing the Probability of Program Success Thorugh Continuous Risk Management.
The origins of this paper came about at a recent JSCC meeting here in Boulder, with local Aerospace contractors, the DCMA (Defense Contract Management Agency) and several government agencies (NRO and NASA). The topic was how can we start getting back to First Principles needed to increase the probability of success?
Tim Lister's original quote is used when we see dysfunction ...
Risk Management is How Adults Manage Projects
Tim sent an email today, with a better quote ...
Q. If you are not managing risk on your project, what are you managing?
A. All the easy stuff.
And as always, in order to manage in the presence of uncertainty, we need to make decisions about how to reduce this uncertainty and therefore reduce the risk that results from the uncertainty. And to make those risk-informed decisions in the presence of reducible and irreducible uncertainty we need to ESTIMATE.
So,
If you're making decisions in the presence of uncertainty and you're NOT estimating the impact of those risks on the probability of success, then you're not managing the project - usually paid with other people's money as an Adult.
Which Brings the next quote we use often...What's the difference between our program and the Boy Scouts?
The Boy Scouts have Adult Supervision.
So let's look at the principles, processes, and practices that will be in the White paper when it is complete. Here's the top-level outline:
- Principles for Increasing the Probability of Program Success
- Risk-Adjusted Plans
- Definitive Descriptions of System Deliverables
- Plans for Increasing Maturity of the Deliverables
- Adjustments for Technical and Cost Uncertainty
- Top Four Sources of Unfavorable Program Performance
- Unrealistic Performance Expectations
- Unrealistic Cost and Schedule Estimates
- Inadequate Assessment of Risk
- Unanticipated Technical Issues
- Impacts of Risk on Program Performance
- Schedule Impacts
- Cost Impacts
- Technical Impacts
- Processes to Prevent Unfavorable Impacts
- System Engineering Processes
- Program Management Processes
- Technical Design, Development, and Testing Processes
- Risk Management Processes
- Estimating Processes
- Margin and Reserve Processes
- Management Reserve Processes
- Practices to Prevent Unfavorable Impacts
- Be Clear About What the System is to Do in Units of Measure Meaningful to the Decision Makers
- Create a Risk Tolerant Technical Approach and Plan
- Develop a High-Level Deterministic Cost and Schedule
- Create a Detailed Risk Adjusted Implementation Plan
- Manage and Adjust These Plans During Implementation
Now your projects may have little or nothing to do with development orbiting spacecraft for earth sciences, manned mission to the ISS, communications, or intelligence systems. But I would suggest that the Principles, Processes, and Practices are universally applicable to any domain that involves the development of a product or service to meet a need of a customer - independent of the method used to develop that product or service. Be it traditional or agile, or anything in between.
Whatever you're working on, whatever method you use, if there is uncertainty in the domain, in the development processes, in the underlying technologies, in anything, then you need to have credible answers to these Five Immutable Principles developed in the presence of those uncertainties.
And as always ...
... if you are working in the presence of uncertainty, in order to provide credible answers to these questions, you'll need to make estimates in some form to provide the confidence - to some level of accuracy and precision - to those paying you that your work is increasing the probability of success, while reducing the uncertainty that unfavorably impacts that probability of success.
