Saturday, August 1, 2015

Old time

Sorting out my library recently I bumped into a little known classic in project management: Modern Project Management by Claude Burrill and Leon Ellsworth.

Flipping through the pages I was a little surprised to see that the sound principles that this pair laid down over 35 years ago still have made little headway in project management.

For example, they wrote about probabilistic risk estimating; most people are naive about this and plan their projects absent of any realistic incorporation of either schedule risk or budget risk. So, of course, too many project slide over one or both to the surprise of the project team and the anguish of the investor.

The corollary of this is that most people embark on a project with a risk management 'ceremony'. They have a chat about risks (no fault mode analysis, no dependency risk analysis based on the project WBS, if there is one) involving making a cute matrix of coloured cells that pretend to represent risk appraisal. Of course, it does not.

For your risk management edification, a useful post on an analytic approach that can provide useful case study input to considering risk.

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