Risk management and pistachios

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

Imagine that you went to a store to buy a package of pistachios for 100 g. For simplicity's sake, let's say that a 100-gram package contains about 100 pistachios, and you know about it. You are looking forward to eating all these 100 ± 3 pistachios. But when you start to eat, you understand that 1/4 of the pistachios are not open at all. We have to throw them out. As a result, if you bought 200 g of pistachios, then eat only 150 pistachios, and not 200, as you might suggest.

This can be very 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 buy not 2, but 3 sachets of 100 g each. As a result, you will get about 225 usable nuts - more than necessary, but you’ll be less upset by this than when you didn’t have enough.

Here is a brief and complete principle of risk management in project management:

1. We identify the risks - we guess that not all pistachios will be fit 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 there will be another meeting of the PMSamara club , dedicated to just the risks. As part of the meeting, I will not give a big excursion into the best practies of working with risks in Scrum projects. Next week I’ll try to do a slidecast on the report.