Risk management is not project management • Hacker News Board

Re: Risk management is not project management

#51

Post by hammock » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 6:29 PM UTC

adontz wrote: post #9

"We do not want the risk. The 3rd party must be accountable for this." Repeat ad infinitum. While it may look like that, dialog happens not because client representatives are dumb. It's because they are afraid. They have toxic corporate culture. It's not safe to fail or discuss possibility of failure. The usual, honestly. So they just want to have a chance to blame someone else and survive when everything goes south.…

What if managers asked people to set goals with the explicit expectation of failure?

Not just “moonshot” but “set 5 goals and you will be judged to succeed if you hit 3/5”

Or “set 5 goals and if you hit at least 80% of all 5, you get credit for making them all”

The concept is already known to sales orgs with quotas and OTE.

Re: Risk management is not project management

#52

Post by lotsOstuf » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 6:39 PM UTC

cassianoleal wrote: post #17

adontz wrote: post #9

"We do not want the risk. The 3rd party must be accountable for this." Repeat ad infinitum. While it may look like that, dialog happens not because client representatives are dumb. It's because they are afraid. They have toxic corporate culture. It's not safe to fail or discuss possibility of failure. The usual, honestly. So they just want to have a chance to blame someone else and survive when everything goes south.…

> It's because they are afraid. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's just because they don't have to make themselves accountable for it because there will be no consequences - if it fails, you get to keep your current position and compensation but also if you succeed you also get to keep those without any gain. In these cases, not making yourself accountable is just the path of least resistance, and one could argue it'…

> if it fails, you get to keep your current position and compensation

Sounds driven by fear of loss

Human emotions do not have an infinite range unlike our human languages.

Economic stability or the loss of is a primary driver of productivity in our society

Re: Risk management is not project management

#53

Post by michibertel » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 7:08 PM UTC

Great Blog Post!

Thinking from the "3rd party" perspective, how should they behave? I often find myself 1. communicating the risks as transparently as possible 2. doing everything in our power to find solutions for things that have already gone wrong.

The more of the scope of services is handled by us as a 3rd party, the more emotional the discussions become when things go wrong in the end.

It certainly depends on the project. Depending on whether it is a one-off project or a project in which recurring value is generated. In the latter case, it is certainly easier to find solutions in this regard.

Re: Risk management is not project management

#54

Post by j-a-a-p » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 7:22 PM UTC

Meh. Project management is all about risk management. This blog does not defuse that wisdom. This blog counters the (attempts to) mitigate the risk to third parties. I agree that is not a wise strategy.

Re: Risk management is not project management

#55

Post by yed » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 7:30 PM UTC

What’s the point of explicitly assigning “accountability” to a client? They aren’t answerable to you so there’s no practical outcome to them being declared accountable. Why not just define the tasks they are responsible for and leave it at that?

Re: Risk management is not project management

#56

Post by halgir » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

hammock wrote: post #51

adontz wrote: post #9

"We do not want the risk. The 3rd party must be accountable for this." Repeat ad infinitum. While it may look like that, dialog happens not because client representatives are dumb. It's because they are afraid. They have toxic corporate culture. It's not safe to fail or discuss possibility of failure. The usual, honestly. So they just want to have a chance to blame someone else and survive when everything goes south.…

What if managers asked people to set goals with the explicit expectation of failure? Not just “moonshot” but “set 5 goals and you will be judged to succeed if you hit 3/5” Or “set 5 goals and if you hit at least 80% of all 5, you get credit for making them all” The concept is already known to sales orgs with quotas and OTE.

If you have five different goals and only need to hit three of them, you're incentivized to focus all efforts on the three easiest ones, and ignore the other two entirely. Or if you only need to hit 80% of each, to go for all low-hanging fruit until hitting 80%, then shift focus.

Non-cynical colleagues will act in as much good faith as they believe the manager is doing when setting the goals. But Goodhart's law lurks everywhere.

Re: Risk management is not project management

#57

Post by j-a-a-p » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 7:39 PM UTC

jes wrote: post #25

Wasn't familiar with RACI acronym: RACI is an acronym derived from the four key responsibilities most typically used: responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed. It is used for clarifying and defining roles and responsibilities in cross-functional or departmental projects and processes. I wish more people briefly defined acronyms at first usage in a document.

For me an author disqualifies if there is an unnecessary use of jargon. In my experience the use jargon is often just a distraction from the fact that there is no thorough understanding of the subject.

Re: Risk management is not project management

#58

Post by p_l » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 7:50 PM UTC

fnordpiglet wrote: post #44

mindvirus wrote: post #23

You have to know what you and others are optimizing for. In big companies, it's rarely the success of the project. Usually it's a combination of keeping your job and growing your career. Most big companies provide limited upside for success, and the downside risk is higher for the people. Consider: 1. The project is successful. You get a nice little bonus at the end, if anything. Maybe a promotion a year later. 2. Th…

First I would say most organizations aren’t optimizing for anything. They’re accounting constructs. Second, however clumsily done, this is what equity incentives are supposed to achieve. The better you do, and its impact on the actual value of the company, the more your equity is worth. There are obvious problems in the model, but at least it’s slightly deeper thinking than the typical “you get paid don’t you?” model…

However, even being on a possibly company-critical project means little to value of one's equity, especially post-IPO.

There's little to no rationality involved in pricing of public shares, and nothing you do as individual contributor has any impact.

Now, if you were a high level manager and could order a layoff...

Re: Risk management is not project management

#59

Post by MattGaiser » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 8:09 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #34

MattGaiser wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if the third party need vouching for. IBM survives in large part because they are a third party you can hire without really putting your own neck out there as the biz folks trust them. At a prior job it was CGI. CGI got a ton of work as when they failed, the lower level people didn't get blamed. Any other vendor would have led to the negative reflection you mentioned.

Depends, my CFO got a lot of flak for choosing to use PwC when it turned out they couldn't deliver. PwC was seen by him to be the safe choice because they were so large and essentially industry standard. He got flak because he didn't do appropriate due diligence. That was his job, so...

I don't want to jump on a man's career, but that is a step in a more competitive direction.

Re: Risk management is not project management

#60

Post by pdonis » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 8:20 PM UTC

toss1 wrote: post #24

This entire exercise seems wrong, or at best, incomplete. There's a Japanese saying that I found useful: "Fix the problem, not the blame." This "accountability" exercise seems here to be viewed as: 'fix the blame in advance'. Instead, the focus should be to identify the potential problems and reduce the risk that they will occur or mitigate the consequences. "Accountability" should only be a tertiary tool to generate…

> This "accountability" exercise seems here to be viewed as: 'fix the blame in advance'.

That's not what "accountability" means. "Accountability" means "who has the ultimate say on what counts as success". In other words, the accountable person has to be a final decision maker: someone who has the authority to say "yes, the task is done" or "no, the task is not done".

That's why it doesn't make sense to put a 3rd party as accountable: they can't possibly be a final decision maker for your company. Someone in your company has to be the one to say whether the task is done or not.

In other words, the article's point is that viewing "accountability" as "who we'll blame if the task fails"--and thus being fine with saying "this 3rd party", as in "we'll just blame this 3rd party if the task fails"--is a bug, not a feature.