Risks

A lot of risks that plague projects have a high probability to occur: e.g. the risk that we don’t deliver the right things, or deliver late, and the underlying causes of these risks. This calls for proactively anticipating potential problems and organizing our work in such a way that the probability of the impact is minimized. The Evolutionary (Evo) approach is just doing that, constantly being aware of what could go wrong and preventing it from going wrong, by design. Instead of assuming a theoretical model of how humans "should" behave, Evo studies actual human behaviour and strives to make optimum use of how humans actually behave. Opposing what’s in our genes is a lost battle.

In booklet #4: "Controlling Project Risk by Design", we first investigate prevailing risk management, concluding that this is about nice academic ideas, but doesn't help much in practice.
Realizing that Project Management is Risk Management, we then show how Evo practices are designed to successfully mitigate typical risks in our work. The techniques discussed are not merely theoretical ideas, but have been tested, honed, and proven by the author in the practice of more than 150 projects in various environments and cultures.

If we do nothing, the risk that we won’t accomplish a certain thing is 100%. In order to accomplish what we want to accomplish, we organize a project, and at the end of the project the risks are to be reduced to an acceptable level. The level will never be zero, as, for example, a meteorite could strike our result just before delivery of the project result. If we have mitigated most of the risks that usually plague projects, then we have much more time left to handle the unexpected risks we still have to deal with.