Waltzing with Bears. Managing Risk on Software Projects
If a project has no risks, don’t do it.
Greater risk brings greater reward, especially in software development. A company that runs away from risk will soon find itself lagging behind its more adventurous competition. By ignoring the threat of negative outcomes – in the name of positive thinking or a can-do attitude – software managers drive their organizations into the ground.
In this book Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister show readers how to identify and embrace worthwhile risks.
The authors present the benefits of risk management, including that it:
- makes aggressive risk-taking possible
- decriminalizes risk
- sets up projects for success
- bounds uncertainty
- provides minimum-cost downside protection
- reveals invisible transfers of responsibility
- isolates the failure of subprojects
Readers are armed with strategies for confronting the most common risk that software projects face:
- schedule flaws
- requirements inflation
- turnover
- specification breakdown
- under-performance
This book will help you mitigate the risk – before they turn into project-killing problems. Risks are out there – and they should be there – but there is a way to manage them.
Foreword to Russian edition
Risk management is project management for adults.
This is not meant to be snide.
- Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister.
Universal principles of project management including those stated in PMI PMBOK® Guide dictate us the necessity to manage risks in any project, and this book gives us a lot of ideas and advices that will be useful for any project manager for sure.
What is the risk management in practice?
What are those basic regularities that often lead to failure of software projects execution on time and under budget with relation to risk management?
What can project manager personally do in order to raise confidence in success and reduce influence of different uncertainties on his project results?
What should top management do in order for risk management processes not only formally being but really saving recourses and time in the process of projects implementation?
How can we value and present benefits of risk management?
You will be surprised of those definite answers you will get. It is possible to start applying in practice the great majority of suggested tools and recommendations at once. The rest recommendations (on the project management level in a company as a whole) are worth to be thoroughly considered by top management of the companies not only developers but also customers. Besides, authors provide the readers with a handy tool for assessing probable schedule and cost of a project. This is a parametric model that is freely downloadable from their Website. This book will also give you some grounding in how to make use of this tool and valuable comments to it.
“Considering only the rosy scenario and building it into the project plan is real kid stuff. Yet we do that all the time. While we’ve been doing these immature things, we’ve been positively trumpeting our increased “maturity” due to improvements in our technical proficiency”, authors say commenting such a well-known maturity model as Capability Maturity Model (CMM), and continue: “What’s needed how is maturity is the other, more traditional, sense. We need to grow up, take explicit note of our risks, a plan accordingly”. We are sure that you will enjoy “growing up” with this book.
Alexey Bazhenov,
Alexey Arefiev
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