Early in the morning on May 27, one of Britain's busiest annual travel days, British Airways canceled all flights from London's two biggest airports. More than 1,000 flights and 75,000 passengers were affected. In a statement, the airline announced that "a major IT system failure" had disrupted flight operations worldwide. [Johnston 2017] [Dans 2017]
On September 28 "network problems" struck the firm Amadeus IT Group SA, whose Altea software "is used by more than 100 airlines worldwide," including "Air France, Southwest, Lufthansa, British Airways, Qantas, China Air and Korean Air." [Rizzo 2017] Passengers around the world reported long lines, and although the system did recover that same day, delays of hours were widespread, and many international passengers missed connections.
On that same day, in the midst of worldwide air traffic disruption, Reuters reported that the United States General Accounting Office would be investigating these disruptions and a string of others that had occurred in the previous six months. [Shepardson 2017] Fires, network outages, human error, and goodness knows what else were suspected causes.
Clearly something was not right with the airlines' management of technological risk. And since no major industry understands technological risk management better than the airlines, it's reasonable to suppose that if the airline industry is having trouble managing technological risk, just about everyone is.
However assiduously we avoid risk, we sometimes find — suddenly, as the airlines did — that we're up to our necks in it. How does this happen? How does risk creep into our projects and our operations? Let's consider projects, because they're time-limited and therefore a little less complicated.
When project champions are required to "sell" When project champions are
required to "sell" a project
internally, they sometimes overcommita project internally, they sometimes overcommit. If that happens because of an inordinately high bar imposed by senior management, one possible cause is a most curious phenomenon, related to what Boehm et al. call a "conspiracy of optimism" [Boehm 2016], and which is actually a variant of the n-person prisoner's dilemma. [Hamburger 1973] Specifically, senior management might be trying to manage enterprise-scale risk by requiring high returns at low risk from individual projects (or even individual portfolios of projects). Ironically, this approach results in risk elevation for the individual projects or portfolios, because project champions must promise the nearly impossible, or the outright impossible, to gain access to resources. The paradoxical result is that risk aversion on the part of senior management fosters an environment in which nearly all activities that are underway are high risk. By attempting to wring risk out of the enterprise, management opens the door and invites it in.
It gets worse. It turns out that the risks confronting individual projects, arising from the unrealistic promises of project champions, are correlated. And that means that when one risk event materializes, others will too. We'll explore how project champions contribute to risk creep next time. Top Next Issue
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Footnotes
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Related articles
More articles on Project Management:
- Personnel-Sensitive Risks: II
- Personnel-sensitive risks are risks that are difficult to discuss openly. Open discussion could infringe
on someone's privacy, or lead to hurt feelings, or to toxic politics or toxic conflict. If we can't
discuss them openly, how can we deal with them?
- Design Errors and Groupthink
- Design errors cause losses, lost opportunities, accidents, and injuries. Not all design errors are one-offs,
because their causes can be fundamental. Here's a first installment of an exploration of some fundamental
causes of design errors.
- False Summits: II
- When climbers encounter "false summits," hope of an early end to the climb comes to an end.
The psychological effects can threaten the morale and even the safety of the climbing party. So it is
in project work.
- Unresponsive Suppliers: I
- If we depend on suppliers for some tasks in a project, or for necessary materials, their performance
can affect our ability to meet deadlines. What can we do when a supplier's performance is problematic,
and the supplier doesn't respond to our increasingly urgent pleas for attention?
- Rational Scope Management
- In project management, rational, responsible scope management helps us focus on the task at hand. But
rational scope management lets us adapt our work to changes in external factors, and changes in our
understanding of the problem.
See also Project Management and Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
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- And on May 22: Rescheduling Collaborative Work
- Rescheduling is what we do when the schedule we have now is so desperately unachievable that we must let go of it because when we look at it we can no longer decide whether to laugh or cry. The fear is that the new schedule might come to the same end. Available here and by RSS on May 22.
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