Risk Management and Pistachios

Recently I watched the film “Sex: The Secret Materialist”, there was a conversation about pistachios. Something I thought about now and I realized that buying pistachios is my good project management training for newbies.



Imagine that you went to the store to buy a package of pistachios per 100 g. Let us assume for simplicity that about 100 pistachios fit in a hundred-gram package, and you know about it. You are anticipating that you will eat all these 100 ± 3 pistachios. But when you start eating, you realize that 1/4 of pistachios are not disclosed at all. We have to throw them out. In the end, if you bought 200 grams of pistachios, then eat only 150 pistachios, not 200, as you might imagine.



This can be quite frustrating. The next time you, as an experienced pistachio eater, should take this risk into account, and if you really want to eat 200 pistachios, then you should not buy 2, but 3 sachets of 100 g each. it is necessary, but from this you will be much less upset than if you did not have enough.



Here, in brief, is the whole principle of risk management in project management:

1. We reveal risks - we guess that not all pistachios will be suitable for eating
2. We take measures to prevent them - we buy more pistachios so that we can eat pistachios, no less than we planned (200 pcs.)

PS: By the way, colleagues from Samara and nearby villages, this Sunday at 15.30 will be held the next meeting of the PMSamara club , dedicated to just the risks. During the meeting, I will not spend a great excursion into the best practies of working with risks in Scrum projects. Next week I will try to make a slidecast on the report.