Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects

23. Test for Risk Management

Whether you are the one responsible for risk management or you are somewhere above that responsibility in the hierarchy, you need some objective way to understand whether or not the work is being done. But why is that? Why can’t you just assume that people responsible for managing projects will be naturally drawn to managing project risks? The reason is that there are powerful false-positive indicators at work in organizations. These false-positives tend to give an unwarranted pass to anything that calls itself management.

Imagine that you are managing above the project level and that risk management should be taking place at the project level (within the projects or peer to them). The false-positive indicator works ...