The Fifth Risk

I recently finished a book by Michael Lewis called The Fifth Risk. The the book’s title is from one of the conversations Lewis had with an official at the US Department of Energy. Lewis asks about the individuals top five risks. The first four are the more obvious ones (like a missing nuclear warhead), and the official has a tough time phrasing them in ways that aline with Lewis’s lack of security clearance. But the fifth one rolls off the tongue far too quickly: project management.

For the past week I have been reflecting on how I see that in heavy civil construction. I take part in many risk register related activities, where the project team gets together to determine the greatest risks and their associated costs. I have never heard anyone mention that how we run a project could be a problem. That might be because it’s all the managers who are in the room determining the risks, and no one wants to admit they might be the issue. Or it might be because its hard to define specifically, and mitigations even more difficult (it’s not as easy as buying a larger water treatment plant). Whatever the reason, project management never goes on the risk register, and, funny enough, it’s always the risks that are not on the register that really cost us.

Being a part of large projects has shown me that it’s not the technical challenges that cost us. It’s the coordination of several hundred knowledge workers working for dozens of stakeholders with a vast array of incentive structures. That’s a problem with very little straight forward solutions. And that’s before any shovel’s go in the ground.

As I wrote the above paragraph, I realized this is not unique to us. So, I figured I would make a list of industries that might have better methods that us, maybe I can find some answers there:

• Software development
• Aerospace
• Film production