Risk management is not a term heard by many. But it is
important to most people and most people practice it in some form every day.
Driving a car is risk management. Walking across a street is risk management.
You have something to do or somewhere to go and there are potential problems in
completing those tasks.
The power of two is guidance for when you should evaluate
your past estimates. If something takes less than twice as long as you expect,
this is probably acceptable. Think of your daily commute: If it normally takes
30 minutes and one day it takes 50 minutes, probably nothing to be concerned
about as it was just a bad traffic day. your normal 30 minute commute took 20
minutes, then perhaps the lights were in your favor. The concern points should
be around twice your estimate or half your estimate. This is the power of two:
Both 1/2 and 2 are powers of 2.
If your commute took 2 hours, it probably wasn’t just a bad
traffic day. Perhaps there is something more you need to do, i.e. investigate a
new route, leave earlier, leave later. If your commute took 15 minutes, it
probably wasn’t the lights in your favor, but that something else is amiss.
Perhaps you are going to work on a holiday. Or perhaps you found a better route
or worse everyone else found a better route. These are the points where you
should think about what might be going wrong. It still may be nothing is actually
wrong and nothing needs to change.
This applies to any task that you estimate for yourself:
knitting that scarf, reading that book, completing homework. So if you find
yourself done in half the time, spend a couple minutes thinking about why it
was so quick. Could just be you overestimated. But it could be that you missed
something important. If you find yourself done in twice or more time, you
should also spend a few minutes thinking about what went wrong. Perhaps it was outside forces that you had no
control over, i.e. it rained. Or there could have been something that you
should have accounted for but didn’t.
Two tasks on my recent list were catching up on business
accounting stuff and giving some TLC to Sudoku Pseudo. I had estimated the
accounting stuff to take me a day or so. It ended up taking me a day and a
half. No reason for concern as the reasons for the delay were obvious and it
was still under the twice the estimate mark. Sudoku Pseudo has turned from what
I expected to be a day project to be something that might take as much as a
week. This is more than twice. So what went wrong? Facebook changed the API
significantly. I stopped receiving updates from Facebook about those changes.
The changes require changes to my web host. It is not Facebook’s fault. I know
they change things constantly. Since I did not spend the time to keep track of
what changes were being made and making changes to keep up or even notice that
I wasn’t receiving updates anymore, I am forced to make a whole bunch of
destabilizing changes at once and taking more time to do it.
