thecoyote

I just acquired the ocean-going motorboat license. Inland and Lake of Constance licenses to follow. :)

I've been working the last couple of months on a team creating standardized project management processes, with an external PM consultant. Besides it being fun watching one more stubborn and strong-opinioned co-worker driving the consultant out of his mind, there are some points I also disagree with him. Most of all, his way of using the risk analysis matrix.

For those that never had to deal with that: it's simply a matrix with the probability of a certain risk coming true on one axis, and the cost of it coming true on the other. So one can create clusters of risks that are:

* unlikely and insignificant
* likely and insignificant
* unlikely and significant
* likely and significant

As you certainly see already by gut feeling, risks that qualify as "likely and significant" need to be given a lot of attention, while unlikely and insignificant risks can practically be ignored. The others... well, they need consideration and observation, especially if it costs money to bring up countermeasures. And here's the issue:

This guy has this at first thought great idea of quantifying risks by multiplying the costs of occurance with the probability of occurance. Mathematicians call this the "expectancy". A risk with a higher expectancy is a bigger issue than one with a lower expectancy.

But let's look at some examples:

1) 0.1% chance of occurance, cost: 10,000,000 €. The big desaster, Extremely unlikely. Expectancy: 10,000
2) 50% chance of occurance, cost 20,000 €. Highly likely and still expensive. Expectancy: 10,000

I think it's already plain to see that these risks, despite having the same expectancy, are by common experience not at all equal. Personally, I'd rather bet on a 99.9% chance than on a 50% chance, unless the 0.1% stake is really high and the 50% stake is really low.

But things get even worse with that method: so someone goes and assumes the first risk - it's all guesswork anyway, keep that in mind - to be 0.15%. New expectancy: 15,000! In that case, it would clearly take priority over the second risk with its mere 10,000. Though all that happened was a large growth on an extremely small scale. A growth that's based on nothing but a guess. So what is the exact probability of rain on next week's Tuesday?

This method not only putting values in relation to each other that are actually rather unrelated, it also implies that those values have any actual accuracy.

Next step, he's using the expectancy to see whether a certain monetary effort to advert the risk is worth it. That basically fails with the same issue: is it worth spending 5,000 on a 0.1 chance to lose 10 millions? Is it worth spending 5,000 on a 50% chance to lose 20,000? Well... maybe. However you look at it - you're simply taking a bet, and no numbers will really help you.

This calculation only works if your not doing one project with those risks, but many projects. In that case, you can estimate an average of 10,000 per project in the long run, and the preventive costs of 11,000 per project not being worthwile. But not for one single project.

I'm a bit afraid that this method gives poeople the wrong ideas...

Just recently I went to a Melissa Etheridge concert in Dresden, the first one for me since 1999 I think, it was the "Breakdown" tour back then, coming to Bielefeld. And what can I say? 13 years later, she still kicks butt. Whilst being rather minimalistic (drums, guitar, bass and some light) in her stage outfit, the fun she has playing her songs and her humor get the crowd totally moving.

The only thing I have to complain about is that she didn't play "You Can Sleep While I Drive", which is the song of all her songs. I still can't believe she did a concert without it. She almost made it even by playing the Tom Petty cover "Refugee" - but really only almost.

Bob and a Downtown Chemnitz Penguin

Sadly, this was the last time Wendy was seen. She ran away when nobody was looking. Poor Bob was devastated.

What else?

How about the motor boating license I'm making? It's not that I actually plan to use it, but I'm a bit interested in seafaring and would like to learn about it, and those licenses are relatively affordable. So I simply signed up to see what happens.

The guy running the boating school told me that I could first start with the sea-worthy license which requires both a theoretic and a practical test. Then I can take a theoretic test to get the license for the Lake of Constance (which has special traffic rules). And then I can go through a length of red tape and have the LoC license simply converted to the "interior" (non-sea) license for rivers and lakes, allowing me to drive every motored boat everywhere. So I thought "why not?" and signed up.

First of all, my New Year's resolution was not "update my blog more frequently". I don't think there's much going to happen in these regards.

But what did happen? Well, both a bit and pretty much nothing. For instance: while my company restructured and re-organized and shuffled a few people around, I stayed pretty much where I was doing what I did before. The only changes are that I moved desks in my office (since both other occupants were transferred away and I took the chance to claim a nicer desk at the window) and that my *other* boss - I used to have two of them anyway - now took over the task of managing me (the other one's just giving me stuff to do).

... how fiscal control over European governments is supposed to be established. I mean, they'll do as they always did: raise fines. But how does sueing some country for several hundred millions or even billions help getting its budget under control?

It feels like pouring more water onto a drowning person to encourage him to swim...

I jus checked the news about the European export ban on sodium thiopental, which is used in the US "lethal injections" for death penalties. Reading that, I found out that there was only one American company that produced that stuff, and they stopped its production because they didn't want it to be used in capital punishment.

For some reason, I'm a bit surprised that a US pharmaceutical company made such a decision. Probably because I'd expected them to consider themselves patriotic for supplying Pentothal to be used in death rows and as a pharmaceutical company not to really care that much about making a political statement. Interesting.