On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 15:31 -0500, Peggy Andrews wrote: > supervisor asking for a risk assessment of NOT doing (completing) the > 1.9 upgrade. > > I would like to answer intelligently - not emotionally.
Sure, easy. Don't try to enumerate the hundreds of things that can go wrong, and don't try to estimate their probabilities. Instead write down the bad things that will happen to your business *when* things go wrong. Tell 'em about the deleterious effects of not getting tax statements out when they're supposed to. (Or choose some other important document.) Can't order parts for the fleet? Sorry, system's down. Without the ability to generate purchase orders we'll have to send people across town with their personal credit cards. We'll write confirming requisitions later; the comptroller always likes that. Not. Can't generate demand A/P checks? Have to do handwrites then... that'll make the comptroller happy too. Tell 'em what happens when you miss a payroll. Besides the hardship imposed on a few thousand households (many of whom live hand-to-mouth) you've got those pesky union contracts to consider. Imagine the bad press. Dasn't be late paying your people, so that'll be another long couple of days of handwrites. Does the City include the local school system? Local utilities? Sanitation? Criminal justice IS? Do you do vital records, tax rolls, property assessments, water management? That's a lot of exposure when something breaks in the firmament. People -- and some project managers -- tend to undervalue stuff that's always present, always there, always works. They begin to think of it as part of the landscape, taken for granted. You pick up your telephone and you ALWAYS expect to hear dial tone; people do this billions of times a day and think nothing of it. Yet they'd be completely lost without it, and they don't appreciate the miracle that it is: behind that dial tone is a hidden team of skilled technicians, supporting a surprisingly complex infrastructure. Your mainframe operation provides dial tone too, in a sense. Reliable by design, it also needs care-and-feeding behind the scenes -- just like your telephone does. Make 'em think of that expense as insurance, and make 'em see what life would be like without it: penny wise, pound foolish. -- David Andrews A. Duda and Sons, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
