Cost of Changes vs. Risk and Uncertainty January 23, 2009
Posted by Darth Sidious in Project Management.trackback
Now and then I keep an eye on some interesting management/leadership/project mgmt blogs.
This interesting post came up on an aspect covered in the upcoming PMBOK V4 (Project Management Book of Knowledge).
In the article they related how Cost of Changes, Stakeholder Influence, and Risk/Uncertainty change throughout the life of the project. They compare how in traditional approaches a project starts off with a high degree of stakeholder influence and low cost of changes – but as the project matures, cost of changes sky rocket, and stakeholder influence drops off quickly.
The stakeholder influence drops off quickly in such scenarios, because in all-or-nothing super-size projects, once the snowball starts rolling you invest so much that you’re unlikely to abandon the work.
So they’re saying the cost of changes can be flattened out, and the risk/uncertainty reduced by using agile/iterative development, while at the same time stakeholder influence can remain relatively high by being able to constantly adjust priorities.
I also liked the thought of this:
“Iterative methods deliberately pull high risk elements of projects forward in the timeline to tackle them early and reduce their impacts. By undertaking the risky work sooner we have more options, time and money at our disposal to solve them or find work-arounds.”
[...] Cost of Changes vs. Risk and Uncertainty by Darth Sidious. “… as the project matures, cost of changes sky rocket, and stakeholder influence drops off quickly” [...]