Reliability is designed into a product. Quality is built into a product. Poor reliability is long term, difficult and expensive to rectify because it is woven into the fabric of the product.
Quality is a relative short term problem because once the badly written procedure, non-compliant material or poor workmanship is identified, it usually can be fixed relatively quickly with minimal impact to the program. Continue reading
In their book Billion Dollar Lessons, Carroll and Mui describe the most inexcusable business failures of the last twenty-five years. One of the failures, “Staying the Course” poses particular difficulties for Risk Analysts.
The difficulty is three fold. First, management believes if it stays the course everything will turn out fine. Absent any significant data to the contrary, it is difficult to change managerial, let alone, institutional inertia.
Second, identifying a viable alternative against which to evaluate the impact of staying the course may be difficult because often the costs and benefits are not clear until years afterwards.
Finally, clients and customers are often psychologically and materially locked into the current strategy. They, therefore, put pressure on the company and its board to stay the course. Continue reading
Many initiatives within an organization are supported by steering committees, committees that decide on the priorities or order of the business. Audit, IT and EHS (Environment Health & Safety) are just a few common examples.
However, not all steering committees are created equal. They can take on many different shapes and forms based on need, initiative scope, subject-matter expertise and company culture, just to name a few. Continue reading
The late Dr. Seuss was a favorite of mine (and continues to be even my adulthood). He taught many lessons that were designed for both children and adults. His shorter pieces were always fun and among them I hold the highest regard for one titled Too Many Daves.
It’s a simple premise about a woman with twenty-three sons all, as you might guess, named “Dave”. The story briefly explains her exploits in calling the boys into the house, getting all twenty-three when she only wanted one. She muses about a different life where she had named them all something different, but in the end, Seuss finishes with, “But she didn’t do it and now it’s too late.” You can just smell the dank, musty aroma of regret hanging on that poor woman’s head. Continue reading
It’s a tale as old as project management itself. Somebody works up a very detailed project schedule and even assigns specific resources to tasks. They even manage to do some basic allocation so Jake from Engineering isn’t working 120 hour weeks for the next five years.
But in their diligence and detail, they overlook a couple of things. They forget that everybody on the project has “a day job” they still have to get done and that recurring events like annual quality reviews or year ends or whatever still happen. In missing them, they put the project at risk of an overly optimistic timeline with unrealistic true allocation. Continue reading