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Schedule Risk

A particular scarcity risk, due to lack of time.

Part Of

Reduced By Practices

  • Automation: Too much focus on automation can distract from more important tasks
  • Contracts: Establishes timelines and milestones to keep the project on track.
  • Delegation: Distributes workload effectively, helping to meet deadlines.
  • Outsourcing: Can speed up project timelines by adding more workforce.
  • Pressure: Helps in meeting tight deadlines by pushing team members to work efficiently.
  • Prioritising: Helps in focusing on high-priority tasks and meeting deadlines.
  • Tool Adoption: Facilitates the use of specialized tools to improve development efficiency and quality.

Attendant To Practices

  • Analysis: Can be time-consuming, potentially delaying the start of development.
  • Approvals: Waiting for approvals can introduce delays in the project timeline.
  • Automated Testing: Writing and maintaining unit tests can be time-consuming.
  • Change Management: Managing changes systematically can introduce delays.
  • Debugging: Debugging can be time-consuming, affecting project timelines.
  • Demo: Demos can introduce delays if not planned and executed properly.
  • Documentation: Creating and maintaining documentation can be time-consuming.
  • Estimating: Inaccurate estimates can lead to schedule overruns.
  • Integration Testing: Can be time-consuming, leading to delays in the project timeline.
  • Issue Management: Managing and resolving logged issues can impact project timelines.
  • Meeting: Can consume a significant amount of time if not managed effectively.
  • Pair Programming: Can slow down individual productivity, impacting overall schedule.
  • Performance Testing: Can be time-consuming, leading to delays in the project timeline.
  • Prototyping: Prototyping can be time-consuming and delay the project timeline.
  • Refactoring: Refactoring can be time-consuming and delay project timelines.
  • Regression Testing: Can be time-consuming and introduce delays.
  • Release: Delays in the release process can impact overall project timelines.
  • Retrospectives: Requires coordination and can disrupt regular workflows.
  • Review: Reviews can introduce delays in the project timeline.
  • Security Testing: Security testing can be time-consuming, impacting schedules.
  • Terms Of Reference: Can take time from the schedule to build.
  • Training: Training sessions can take time away from development, impacting schedules.
  • User Acceptance Testing: UAT can be time-consuming, potentially delaying the release.

Schedule Risk is very pervasive, and really underlies everything we do. People want things, but they want them at a certain time. We need to eat and drink every day, for example. We might value having a great meal, but not if we have to wait three weeks for it.

And let's go completely philosophical for a second: were you to attain immortality, you'd probably not feel the need to buy anything. You'd clearly have no needs. Anything you wanted, you could create yourself within your infinite time-budget. Rocks don't need money, after all.

In the section on Feature Risk we looked at Market Risk, the idea that the value of your product is itself at risk from the whims of the market, share prices being the obvious example of that effect. In Finance, we measure this using price, and we can put together probability models based on how much money you might make or lose.

With Schedule Risk, the underlying measure is time:

  • "If I implement feature X, I'm picking up something like 5 days of Schedule Risk."
  • "If John goes travelling that's going to hit us with lots of Schedule Risk while we train up Anne."

... and so on. Clearly, in the same way as you don't know exactly how much money you might lose or gain on the stock-exchange, you can't put precise numbers on Schedule Risk either.