LabVIEW Life Lessons #8 - Push Risk Forward

[swatts]

Hello Risk-takers

This article concentrates on a very simple rule we apply to all our projects, it's

Identify Risk and Tackle it First

The best way to emphasize this is to describe some common scenarios.

Scenario #1 Hardware

We quite often get projects where the hardware is purchased prior to even a schematic being drawn. You then are presented with hardware you are unfamiliar, for a use-case you barely understand. So what we do first is manually get the thing running. In fact one of our standard milestones is a manual hardware screen, with this you can test the wiring, start exercising the UUT (unit under test), confront your customer with the real world.

Scenario #2 Badly Defined Requirements

Very rarely* one of our clients doesn't fully define their requirements accurately, sometimes they don't fully understand how the system goes together, how the hardware works, even how their UUTs work. So it's not incomprehensible that they can't define their systems requirements. Once again we therefore have to confront them with the real world as quickly and cheaply as possible. To mitigate these risks we use prototype screens.

Scenario #3 Payment

For SSDC we deal with approximately 5 new clients a year, some are nice, some not so much. To mitigate financial risk in the UK you can do some rudimentary checks. Websites like companycheck, DueDil are very useful for some background checks. Talk to your suppliers. Generally we make sure our hardware liabilities are paid first, so pro-forma invoices are the way to go. Define your terms (30 Days Net) and stick to them!

The standard project management approach is to do a Risk Assessment and a matching Method Statement (RAMS), while we only do these on an informal basis (some companies require them to work in certain environments) it's not actually a bad idea to think about risks.

And you should never ever sit on them and hope they go away!

Lots of Love

Steve

* By very rarely I actually mean all the bloody time.