Many, many years ago I held the pager for my company. This was long before cloud computing, long before devops, and long before infrastructure as code. Mostly the pager fired … Continue reading Learning by doing… in rehearsal

Many, many years ago I held the pager for my company. This was long before cloud computing, long before devops, and long before infrastructure as code. Mostly the pager fired … Continue reading Learning by doing… in rehearsal
Most people think of risk management as stopping bad things from happening. But ideally it’s really uncertainty management. That does cover reducing the chances of bad things happening, but it … Continue reading Risk management – helping good things happen
Last week I wrote about how traditional risk “scoring” doesn’t translate easily to the way probability is best described, which is a probability density curve. Those are things like bell … Continue reading A different way to score risk
A couple of weeks ago I said that, although I think it’s a mistake to “score” risk events in terms of simple likelihood and impact, it’s not entirely devoid of … Continue reading Translating risk scoring into probability density distributions
A colleague once needed some help with a work-related problem, and she spoke to a large number of people to see how they had tackled similar problems in the past. … Continue reading Advice doesn’t have to agree
A long while ago I spent a fair bit of time looking at “risks” on a risk list. There was a long list of “things that might go wrong”, and … Continue reading Two things about likelihood times impact in risk
I’ve long been bothered by the concept of “risk appetite”. It’s always seemed one of those things that is both intellectually alluring and impossible to grasp practically. But recently I … Continue reading A simple numerical view of risk appetite
I was speaking to friend recently, who had just taken on a new role leading a large-scale organisational transformation (only part of which involved IT change). Along the way, she … Continue reading Uncertainty during transformation
I was reading an article the other day about the dangers of making one-sided judgements about risk (tl;dr: always consider risk and reward together) and in the comments underneath someone … Continue reading Goals that show success, but don’t define it
I’m due to have a conversation with someone about an ambitious startup-type idea they’re seeking to run within an established company. They have an idea—it might be a great one–and … Continue reading The bell curve of project versus business