Imagine being the father of the bride.
You have barely come to terms with the fact that your little princess is leaving the fort, and now you meet the other tradition attached to the role, which is financial. She chose the dress at thirteen. The color of the napkins was settled before her sweet sixteen.
The piggy bank comes off the shelf, and you hire a wedding planner, who is your project manager for the day.
She gathers the requirements, builds the plan, and puts a budget against it.
So. Do you now sleep soundly, knowing that a fairytale wedding cannot possibly run into trouble?
What about the risk of a wedding shower. The wet kind.
What about a power failure, in a marquee, at nine in the evening, with two hundred people in it. The band not turning up. Somebody falling ill. The venue writing to you in April to say it regrets to inform you.
Do you sit down with your planner and work through all of that?
Definitely.
What you would actually do
You watch the forecast, and you keep enough cash aside to put up two large party tents if it turns against you.
You hire a generator. Not enough to run the whole thing, but enough for cold champagne and music, which between them are most of a wedding.
You put a penalty clause in the band’s contract, because that lowers the chance of them letting you down, and your planner keeps a list of disc jockeys by the phone anyway, because it does not remove the chance entirely.
You arrange for a first aid team to be there.
Then there is the venue canceling at the last minute, which is the one with the highest impact and the lowest likelihood. You can spend real money holding a backup location. You can negotiate a cancellation penalty heavy enough to keep them honest. Or you can look at the number, decide it is unlikely enough to live with, and accept it.
All three are fine. What they have in common is that somebody decided, in advance, with the cost in front of them.
On the day, there is one shower. Nobody minds, because the tents are up. Good for you.
The band arrives. Uncle Peter passes out after a glass or two of champagne too many and is looked after by the first aid team. The generator is never switched on, which in hindsight was money spent for nothing, and you would spend it again, because a power failure with no backup would have finished the evening.
Your wallet is lighter. Your daughter is as happy as anyone can be. Everyone who visits her over the next few years will sit through the album and ninety minutes of video saying how delightful.
You would call that a good outcome.
The same risks, at work
Now compare that to how a project gets treated.
The project manager is expected to identify the risks up front and then keep managing them. That part usually happens. The risks are named, the likelihood and impact are assessed, and mitigation is proposed with a price against it.
And the Steering Committee looks at the number attached to things that have not happened, and frowns.
“What is this money for?”
The objections are always the same, and they are worth writing down properly, because they sound reasonable in the room.
“What is this money for?”
“Why should we approve this now?”
“This will only make the project unnecessarily expensive, when we do not even know whether we will need it.”
Underneath all three is one belief that nobody ever states out loud. That the risks are virtual. That their real probability is somewhere near zero, and that naming them on a log is the same as dealing with them.
They are not virtual. A risk does not become smaller because somebody updated a column, and the weather does not consult the budget before deciding what to do in June.
Then a major issue arrives, and you can guess who is most shocked by it. The same people. Even though the risk had been written down from the first week of the project, in a document they had all seen.
That is the part that never stops being strange. It was identified. It was assessed. It was presented. And it still never registered as something that might actually happen, because nobody was ever asked to pay for it.
The father of the bride did not need a log to tell him it might rain.
He booked the tents.