“Risk factors” sound like some of those big fancy words that don’t translate into everyday action in your life. Or if they do, you think of something occasional and unlikely, so you don’t think about it. “Yeah, sure, there can be a nuclear war tomorrow and a nuclear bomb can explode in the middle of the city killing me but, oh well, there’s nothing I can do, so I’m not even going to think about it.”
That attitude may make sense in your non-professional life (or may not, but that’s another chapter) but professionally, I’d flip it on its head. The core role of the professional, in one possible framing, is this: the professional’s job is to predict what could most likely go wrong and do everything they can to make that less likely to happen.
I realized this many, many moons ago when I met a high-end party planner. She sold me instantly by telling me this: “I have a list I’ve been collecting for a decade of everything that can go wrong in any expensive party, listed by likelihood, and what my job really is to go down that list and ensure none of them happen. Let me give you some examples.” And she went on to tell me how few venues ever have enough glasses so the guys who wash the dishes are always overwhelmed and there’s often a delay in getting people drinks just because there aren’t enough glasses, so she will ensure they have more glasses available than the venue usually does, and so forth.
I was sold, ten times over, just by that line of thought.
But it led to a bigger realization: this is how all professionals should operate, always. Do you want to hire me to do some online marketing for you? Okay, here are the ten main reasons why anyone else who tries to run your marketing will fail, and exactly what I’m going to do to minimize the chance it fails!
This has a few direct implications for the designer’s work with his clients or any manager.
One is this: a great methodology when embarking on any client’s project is to make a list of all the risk factors on why it could fail—ranked by the combination of two criteria, the likelihood of that failure and the severity of the failure if it does happen—and then, with this list already ordered by importance, go down the list and work with the client to eliminate the risks.
For example, if you’re doing a user interface, maybe the risk is that enough people don’t sign up. Or another risk is the high-quality imagery slows down the site too much. Or another risk is that we design it desktop-first when most users of the product are mobile-first. And so forth.
Note that ordering it by both criteria mentioned above is important because many risk factors are so minor that they aren’t worth the effort to solve, or may be very severe if they happen but are so unlikely to happen that they’re not worth the effort either. The nuclear bomb example falls into the latter case, especially in the post-Berlin Wall world, at least.
I’d go a step further and suggest incorporating risk factors into many client analyses. You’re giving him a timeline for when some work will be ready? Include the risk factors, “The most likely reason why we’ll miss the deadline is because I don’t get the required collateral from you in time.” This is great documentation in case there are delays or problems and also makes it very clear to your client what he needs to do to ensure you’re able to do your work as effectively as possible.
