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Glossary of Risk Types

Agency Risk

People all have their own agendas. What do you do about that?

Boundary Risk

Risks due to the commitments we make around dependencies, and the limitations they place on our ability to change.

Channel Risk

Risks due to the inadequacy of the physical channel used to communicate our messages. e.g. noise, loss, interception, corruption.

Complexity Risk

A lot of advice around constructing software comes back to simplicity. Why?

Conceptual Integrity Risk

Risk that the software you provide is too complex, or doesn't match the expectations of your clients' internal models.

Coordination Risk

What prevents us working as a team? Why are distributed systems so hard?

Deadline Risk

What is the point of a deadline? Do they serve a useful purpose?

Dependency Risk

Risk faced by depending on something else, e.g. an event, process, person, piece of software or an organisation.

Feature Access Risk

Risk of not being able to access a dependency in a timely fashion due to it's scarcity.

Feature Drift Risk

Risk that the features required by clients will change and evolve over time.

Feature Fit Risk

Risk that the needs of the client don't coincide with services provided by the supplier.

Feature Risk

Risk you face when providing features for your clients.

Funding Risk

A particular scarcity risk, due to lack of funding.

Implementation Risk

Risk that the functionality you are providing doesn't match the features the client is expecting, due to poor or partial implementation.

Map And Territory Risk

Risks due to the differences between reality and the internal model of reality, and the assumption that they are equivalent.

Market Risk

Risk that the value your clients place on the features you supply will change, over time.

Message Risk

Risks caused by the difficulty of composing and interpreting messages in the communication process.

Operational Risk

Risks of losses or reputational damage caused by failing processes or real-world events.

Process Risk

Risks due to the following a particular protocol of communication with a dependency, which may not work out the way we want.

Protocol Risk

Risks due to the failure of encoding or decoding messages between two parties in communication.

Red Queen Risk

The general risk that the competitive environment we operate within changes over time.

Regression Risk

Risk that the functionality you provide changes for the worse, over time.

Reliability Risk

Risks of not getting benefit from a dependency due to it's reliability, either now or in the future.

Scarcity Risk

Scarcity Risk is about quantities of a dependency, and specifically, not having enough.

Staff Risk

The aspect of dependency risks related to employing people.

Trust And Belief Risk

Risk that a party we are communicating with can't be trusted, as it has agency or is unreliable in some other way.