Risky Business

In the movie that turned Tom Cruise into a box office success, he plays a young man who has his eyes opened to the infinite possibilities of those who are willing to take risks.

In our world here at MSIS, risk underlies everything we do.  We want to be successful, so each decision is weighed against the probability of a positive outcome.  It's only natural.

What factors do you use to weigh risks?  Do you only consider the immediate effects or do you consider long term effects as well?  Let me give you an extreme example of what I mean.  Consider World War II.  This was by any definition a horrible event in human history with unimaginable amounts of death, suffering and destruction.  Yet, good arguments have been made to support the theory that many of mankind's greatest technological accomplishments, such as nuclear energy and modern aviation, were born out of this tragedy.

My point is that when we evaluate risk, it is important to weigh the cost of failure against the longer term benefits of having tried something.  Look, few people actually want to fail and they don't set out to learn from mistakes.  On my team, we are faced with choices almost daily.  When a support request comes in or a recurring task needs to be handled or we need to incorporate a business process change, we need to determine if we should do the minimum required to handle the situation or if we should go beyond the isolated instance of the requirement to the broader ramifications.

Should we automate something that we currently do manually?  If we do, we risk breaking other functionality.  We risk spending more time than we had planned and jeopardizing our schedule.  We may even risk investing in something that will never return the time it took to make the change.  These decisions carry an increased risk for us because we know the curriculum will be changing, but we don't know if or when products in our current portfolio will no longer be viable.  Will our investments return benefits for one more year?  Two?  Three?

This week, we decided to spend some extra time to redo the interface on a page of the M4 Handbook application.  We know that we could create problems and we know that we're using a day or two of our precious time.  However, the team is learning new ways to build better applications.  The short term risks are manageable and the longer term benefits could be considerable.  There was no math involved in the decision.  There are too many unknowable variables.

Sometimes, you just need to follow your instincts and the knowledge you have.  I believe good teams will end up making good decisions most of the time.  I believe I am on a good team.  Decisions are always risky business.  Sometimes, you just have to say "what the..."  If you saw the movie, you know how the story ends.