Tagged risk
5 pieces
- · 8 min read
Inventory on a Copy, Touch Nothing Live
The cheapest risk reduction available in a migration is a first gate that runs entirely against a database copy and ships no features. Because there is no operational risk, the work can be thorough, and thoroughness is the entire value. This is how to scope, price and sell a milestone whose deliverable is documentation rather than software.
- · 10 min read
Put The Acceptance Risk In The Smallest Milestone
When final acceptance happens on hardware you will never physically touch, that stage is the one you control least. On a fixed-price engagement, weighting milestones by effort puts your largest payment behind your weakest position. Weight them by controllability instead: the big work sits in the middle, where you own the bench, and the remote-acceptance stage is deliberately the smallest.
- · 7 min read
Prove You Can Get the Data Before You Build the Thing That Needs It
For products whose value is access to someone else's data, the risk that ends the project is not the engineering. It is whether you can obtain the data at all, on terms that permit your use case, at a price the product can carry. That question is answerable in days for a few hundred pounds, and it is routinely answered last, after the architecture has been built on an assumption.
- · 7 min read
Milestones for a Buyer Who Cannot Read the Code: Make Each One Independently Checkable
A non-technical client cannot evaluate progress by looking at the work, so milestones built around internal stages leave them trusting rather than knowing. Structure the stages so each ends in something they can verify themselves, put the milestone that could end the project first, and put the one you control least in the smallest envelope.
- · 7 min read
A Reading Is Only as Good as Its Weakest Hop, So Prove the Whole Path Before You Commit the Fleet
Owning one layer of a telemetry chain means shipping a dashboard that is confidently wrong in ways nobody upstream can see. Four proven hops and one unproven does not give you four fifths of a product. The question worth paying to answer first is whether the whole path holds end to end, and the deliverable from that answer includes the gaps, marked rather than smoothed over.