Taking a Risk and Sticking to It

In the world of consulting, it can be difficult to find time to incorporate elements outside your comfort zone. Businesses pay consultants to produce work in a manner the consultant feels can sustain quality. If we were to explain to clients that we’d like to experiment on their projects, very few clients would gracefully accept this. Experimentation can come in many forms, some of which include new project management tools, communication mediums, schedules, and especially software packages.

It’s important to experiment, however. The key to incorporating experiments into a project is to balance its risk level alongside all the other factors involved. If the overall project risk level is low, plan on doing an above-average amount of experimentation. When the project risk is high, this leaves little room for more risky endeavors. In the case where the overarching project risk is high, the primary antidote is time. During estimation, factor in the experiments you’d like to conduct.

Once the risk has been taken, stick to it. It’s more important to stick to a risk than to take a risk. It’s easy to take a risk. It’s much more difficult to carry risk over time. Managing the challenge is where most of the learning proceeds. By maintaining the risk, not only can we better grasp how to handle it, but we can learn to more effectively communicate pros and cons, broaden our knowledge base, grow our skill set, gain an appreciation for alternatives, and work with what we got. Learning should be the primary emphasis; applying the most appropriate tooling can come later.