Talk to me about identifying and managing risks.
TL;DRRisk management means spotting things like unexpected found work that could hurt the schedule, assessing and tracking mitigations, and sometimes simply accepting the risk, since mitigations often don't work.
Yeah, so risk management is a huge part of what we do. Part of making sure you're delivering things on time is making sure that you're trying to, as proactively as possible... The thing that you are looking out for are things that can negatively impact your schedule, right? And it's impossible to be able to 100% identify risk ahead of time, 100% of the time, but you try to identify things as they're happening. So as an example, if you have a gate review coming up for a particular feature or a ship or something like that, and something happens where some found work appears seemingly out of nowhere: hey, we didn't know that we needed to add this additional thing. That is a risk at that point. We don't quite know what this is yet, but it very well could have an impact on the milestone we're about to hit, the stage gate we're about to hit. So let's have a meeting about it. Let's talk about it and assess what is the scope of this thing that's come out of nowhere. Can we somehow make this work within our current schedule by bringing somebody else in to help out or reducing the scope somewhere else? This is risk mitigation, right? You're taking the problem, you're assessing a potential solution to mitigate that problem, and you're tracking that. You're saying, okay, I've got that documented. If this thing comes to pass, I know to execute in this way, and hopefully if you are able to mitigate the risk, you keep your schedule on track. Often the mitigation strategies don't work, or there's nothing you can do. There is a risk mitigation strategy called accept. Sometimes you have to just accept the risk, or it's a business decision. You know what? We're willing to accept that risk because of any number of different reasons, right?