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Staff Risk

The aspect of dependency risks related to employing people.

Part Of

Reduced By Practices

  • Estimating: Helps in planning and managing staff usage effectively.
  • Outsourcing: Accesses external resources and skills that may not be available internally.

Attendant To Practices

Since staff are a scarce resource, it stands to reason that if a startup has a "Runway", then the chances are that the founders and staff do too, as this article by Entrepreneur.com explores. It identifies the following risks:

  • Company Cash: the Runway of the startup itself
  • Founder Cash: the Runway for a founder, before they run out of money and can't afford their rent.
  • Team Cash: the Runway for team members, who may not have the same appetite for risk as the founders do.

You need to consider how long your staff are going to be around, especially if you have Key Person Risk on some of them. People like to have new challenges, move on to live in new places, or simply get bored. Replacing staff can be highly risky.

The longer your project goes on for, the more Staff Risk you will have to endure, and you can't rely on getting the best staff for failing projects.

Student Syndrome​

Student Syndrome is, according to Wikipedia:

"Student syndrome refers to planned procrastination, when, for example, a student will only start to apply themselves to an assignment at the last possible moment before its deadline." - Wikipedia

Arguably, there is good psychological, evolutionary and risk-based reasoning behind procrastination: if there is apparently a lot of time to get a job done, then Schedule Risk is low. If we're only ever mitigating our biggest risks, then managing Schedule Risk in the future doesn't matter so much. Putting efforts into mitigating future risks that might not arise is wasted effort.

Or at least, that's the argument: if you're Discounting the Future To Zero then you'll be pulling all-nighters in order to deliver any assignment.

So, the problem with Student Syndrome is that the very mitigation for Schedule Risk (allowing more time) is an Attendant Risk that causes Schedule Risk: you'll work within the more generous time allocation more slowly and you'll end up revealing Hidden Risk later. And, discovering these hidden risks later causes you to end up being late because of them.