Tech Leading - Risk Management

Articles

Matt Blumberg - The Value of Paying Down Technical Debt Takeaway: Use evidence of the need to pay off, and then show there is a payoff
Kate Matsudaira - Assessing Technical Risks for Startups Takeway: List of questions to ask and things to think about when you take over a new technical role at a CTO/VP level.
Dan Abel - How to Manage Delivery and Risk (Be a Well Rounded Technical Lead, part 3)

Dr Jonathan Graham - Managing business risks together [11:23] Takeaway: Explains how to use Cynefin framework in relation to identifying risks. Provides some techniques for communicating (Cause, Event, Consequence) and Prioritising (Likelihood, Impact, Detection) for risks.
Casey Ayers - Pluralsight - Managing Project Communications and Risks 💲
Jim Holmes - "OMG! This Codebase Sucks!" Paying Down Tech Debt While Delivering Value [1:00:21] Takeaway: 4 part approach to working and evaluating technical debt based around the business value it offers. Evaluate where you are with all stakeholders present. Work out what the business goals are. Measure how bad it is in the code. Improve readability first. Keep using the same metrics when you come to fix things (and after). Everything in dealing with tech debt comes back to organisational culture.

Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons, Patrick Kua, Pramod Sadalage - Building Evolutionary Architectures: Automated Software Governance 💲 Takeaway: Prioritise the dimensions of your system that matter most. Protect those dimensions from change where possible using fitness functions. Different architectures have different size (quanta) of change. One size architecture does not exist - transaction boundaries may significantly influence your architecture.
Atul Gawande - The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right 💲 Takeaway: The use of checklists dramatically raises effectiveness and reduces errors. Checklists establish a higher standard of baseline performance. In the end, a checklist is only an aid. If it doesn’t aid, it’s not right. Concise, clear and collaborative. They are living processes and change over time.
Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister - Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects 💲 Takeaway: Without risk management, projects can not work out what is realisticly deliverable. Projects suffer from selective myopia about catastrophic risks. Projects often get estimated to deliver on the first day there is a non-zero chance of being finished - rather than the most likely date of delivery. Delivery dates are a window of uncertainty, the length of which is due to process noise. Use historical projects in the organisation to work out how much process noise occurs.

Troy Magennis - FocusedObjective.Resources Some great tools here for forecasting project delivery taking into account risk; understanding how many latent defects your application may contain; and capability mapping for your teams. Also some great presentations and workshops on many agile and project delivery related topics. Standout Forecasting using Data Workshop Manual

Something that comes up over and over again - how do you successfully migrate from one system to another.

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