Risk Bench(tm) and Risk Management

What is risk management?

Risk management is the active identification, recording, and management of potential risks in a project. The Software Program Managers Network has identified risk management as one of the most critical software practices. Risk management should be practiced through out the project. Project sponsors should appoint a risk manager for the project and establish risk reporting procedures. All members of the project should participate in identifying risks. The risk manager should assign and track tasks to reduce potential damage from risks.

Managing risk

An organization can choose to handle a risk in one of four ways:
1. Transfer the risk
2. Reject the risk
3. Reduce the risk
4. Accept the risk.

Transferring risk means contracting with another organization to accept the risk. For example, on a project, the project can contract with another organization to perform tasks at a fixed price, thereby transferring the risk of a cost overrun (or at least partially transferring the risk).

Rejecting the risk means denying that it is actually a risk. Without solid grounds for denying the risk, this approach can be dangerous.

Reducing the risk involves implementing countermeasures. For example, a project can institute a formal change request process to insure that increases in requirements do not produce unexpected cost overruns.

Accepting the risk involves understanding the level of risk and deciding to live with it. For example, a project may maintain a contingency budget. The project acknowledges the risk of cost overruns and chooses to accept this risk.

Risk management sheds light on these choices and the helps insure that the mitigation steps are taken.

Why is risk management important?

Software projects are usually very risky. The Standish Group, in its Chaos surveys, suggests that approximately a quarter of all software projects fail to deliver any useful software and that another fifty percent have substantial cost or schedule overruns. Software projects, particularly large ones, are risky investments.

In many cases, project participants are reluctant to discuss project risks. Project participants are often aware of risks, but are sometimes inclined to ignore these risks. Some project participants may feel that openly discussing project risks may cause senior management to reduce funding or cancel projects.

Such behavior is short sighted. With projects, the greatest latitude in taking corrective action is at the beginning of projects. Usually risks manifest themselves later in the project, particularly if proper monitoring is not in place. Moreover, project sponsors and senior managers dislike unpleasant surprises, resulting in a lack of trust in the project team. It is far better to openly discuss and take action to mitigate project risks.

RiskBench™

RiskBench is a Microsoft OneNote notebook used to manage project risks. The template for RiskBench can be downloaded here. This Web page contains instructions for installing the template.

RiskBench is divided into several sections. The first section captures basic information about the project, including naming the risk manager. The second section contains a set of pages describing active risks. Active risks are risks that are currently being managed. The third section contains a set of pages for closed risks. Closed risks are risks that no longer are considered serious enough to be managed. When active risks are closed, they can be moved to the closed risk section. The fourth section contains a user manual that describes how to fill in the risk template.

Risk information is entered in a page template, one page for each risk. The page template provides space for entering the description of the risk, data about the risk, contingency plans, mitigation plans, and events related to the risk.

Single pages can be printed, or all the pages in a section can be printed.

New Waysys Web Site

For the New Year, Waysys has revamped its Web site. The motivation has been to use Web tools to make it easier to add content to the site. The prior version of the site was based on a template with hardcoded menus. Adding content to the site involved editing the HTML template and adding a lot of links in the menus. The process was labor intensive and error prone. Adding content involved a considerable amount of manual testing of the links.

I have been tempted to write a tool that would accept a document in XML and have the Web server translate the document into HTML, adding menus and other navigation aids. When adding articles to the Web site, I can concentrate on content and let the tool generate the menus and other navigation. However, client commitments never allowed the time to write this tool.

Fortunately, an open source project has written the tool for me: the Apache Forrest Project. As the developers describe the project:

Apache Forrest is a publishing framework that transforms input from various sources into a unified presentation in one or more output formats.

The project was started in 2002 with the objective of providing "efficient xml.apache.org group of project websites with a uniform, lightweight, easy-to-navigate layout and structure."

The framework provides a Web server that understands how to convert various XML document types into HTML, PDF, and text. The primary XML document type is an article document that would correspond to a page on the Web site. After authoring the content in this document type, the file can be transferred to the Web server, which will render the content in HTML with a good set of menus, including a site map. This navigation is generated automatically and requires a minimum of testing.

The Web server operates in two modes. There is an interactive mode in which updates to the XML documents are immediately viewable on the site, and a static mode in which the HTML pages are pre-processed and used instead of the XML. Since my Web site has only a few viewers, I run in the interactive mode. (My wife says I kill off my Web site readers by boring them to death.) Interactive mode makes it easy to experiment with features and immediately see the results.

The primary XML document type definition (DTD) is nearly the same as the one I would design for this usage. It is suitable for both Web pages and reports to be rendered in portable document format (PDF). It is considerably simpler than the DocBook DTD and uses many of the familiar HTML tags like paragraph and anchor. I found it easy to author content using the Forrest DTD.

The software, written in Java and XML, is easy to download and install. More advanced features require some experimentation to get right. The resulting layout is functional with good navigation capabilities. Site search is implemented through Google or other search.

Thanks to Forrest, I can update my site with much less effort.

Note Studio Now Off the Market

Last Spring, I purchased a computer with the new Microsoft Vista operating system. I was disappointed to learn that Note Studio did not run under Vista. It has been my hope that DogMelon would bring out a new version that would work under Vista. However, for the last several months there has been no news about a new version.

On September 17, 2007, DogMelon announced they were dropping sales and support for Note Studio. This news is disappointing, since I valued the flexibility, power, and simplicity of Notes Studio.

A few months back, I shifted my GTD handling to Microsoft OneNote 2007. With this new version, Microsoft has added some features that make it much more suitable for GTD. One enhancement is hyperlinks. The user can now create a hyperlink from one page to an other. I have wondered why this feature was not in the original version. It always seemed a "must have" feature for any note taking software.

OneNote also allows the user to tag tasks with various types of tags. The user can then request a list of tagged tasks. OneNote does not have the back link capability to see what pages refer to a particular page. However, the tag capabilities provide an alternative.

I am now in the process of moving my templates from Note Studio to OneNote.