People in Projects

A Whole New Area of Risk

It was insidious, but over time an ever-increasing percentage of our normal workday has become consumed by recovery actions. These aren’t exciting or even particularly unique activities; these are situations when someone gets ill or a machine needs scheduled or unscheduled maintenance. We unconsciously rely on and become dependent upon our support personnel to perform recovery actions for us. We do this so often that we typically consider their actions a part of the norm! “That’s not a failure, not even an exception,” we cry. “It was merely a hiccup!” We don’t plan for these events, but somehow we take them into account when we schedule our workload. Not knowing what will go wrong, we unconsciously build the time into ...