Re: risk assessment

[Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net>]

Warning! Land mines!

Jeff,

I'm sorry I missed Jane's original post that you responded to, so this 
may be out of context. If so, I apologize and offer an Emily Litella 
Never Mind!

The phrase "risk assessment" contains a land mine for tech writers 
because it has two orthogonal meanings, and it is generally unclear 
which is meant unless you ask pointed questions.

In an engineering context, risk assessment is a formal process in which 
you analyze a product and tabulate what can go wrong, how likely it is 
for each of those things to go wrong, and what the consequences are. In 
the case of user documentation, having a page break between "push the 
red button" and "after cutting the blue wire" would constitute a 
low-probability, high-consequence risk.

In a business context, risk assessment has to do with financial business 
risk--not environmental risk, the personal safety of product users, or 
the health of factory workers making the product. If we release the 
product two months later than planned, how much smaller will our market 
share be? If we release it on time but without several key features, how 
will that affect sales? In the case of user documentation, releasing 
poor-quality docs on time is lower risk than releasing tested, edited, 
commercially printed docs three weeks late--exactly the opposite of what 
an engineering risk analysis would conclude.

The Big Problem is that when a project manager lists "risk analysis" as 
a bullet point on a PowerPoint slide at a department meeting, you can't 
tell whether the manager is wearing his engineering hat or his corporate 
management hat. In fact, the manager may not know which sense of the 
phrase applies; he may be listing a requirement from a corporate process 
document and the manager may himself be misinterpreting the meaning.

So before you do anything relating to risk analysis, trace the 
requirement back up the corporate tree as far as you can--preferably to 
the source--and be sure you know which meaning applies before you 
actually begin the work.

Dick

Jeff Allen wrote: