Jul 25, 2009
Houston, we have an issue – Risks & Issues
Blogathon Workspace, 11 AM
Image Source: Wikipedia
“Houston, we have a problem” <ominous music playing>
We all know the tag line in the movie based on Apollo 13 incident, with Tom Hanks playing James Lowell. What sounds like a minor malfunction becomes one of the biggest problems resulting in NASA’s greatest salvaging attempt to bring back the astronauts to safety. It’s one of my favourite movies as well. We, in IT, have a way of using the word “Issue” – somehow we tend to think that “issue” sounds less serious than “problem” or “defect”.
I’m guilty of over-usage of the word too. When a risk is left unaccounted for, it becomes an issue. Hence proper risk assessment needs to be done. Risks need to be identified early on in a project, and one of the actions – Avoidance (ways to avoid the risk), Mitigation (prepare risk mitigation plan) or Assumption (know that we’re aware of the risk, but that it won’t have an adverse impact) need to be taken.
When a risk becomes an issue, that’s when impact analysis comes in the picture. What will it take to fix it? What is the impact if we don’t fix it? As Jack Bauer in 24 would say, “Mr President, if we don’t fix this, millions of customers would be affected.”
Oh, and I’m running out of time, damn it!
A Business Systems Analyst pondering over requirements analysis, process improvements, project management, communication, story telling, the meaning of life and how everything fits together. This blog is to share my thoughts on all these and more.
My husband has about 5 meetings to go to every month (plus the little meetings they schedule in between the 5 that happen every month). It’s a huge waste of his time as most of those meetings don’t even involve him or his department.