Authors’ Note
,This text is divided into five parts, each one intended to answer one of the major questions likely to be on the mind of a new or potential risk manager:
Part I: Why bother to do risk management?
Part II: Why shouldn’t we do it? (Wherein the authors come clean about some of the potential negatives of introducing risk management into an organization that isn’t quite ready for it.)
Part III: How shall we go about it?
Part IV: How much risk should our organization be willing to take?
Part V: How do we know whether or not
our risk management approach is working?
The page introducing each new part breaks down the overall question into detailed questions. By reading the chapters in each part, you should find answers to all those questions—or we haven’t done our job.
Voice
Most of the text is written in the plural voice, with “we” standing for both authors. On occasion, we like to get in a word or two in our individual voices, and that gives rise to paragraphs set off like these:
TRL: Here’s me (Tim) speaking in my own voice.
TDM: And this one is me (Tom).
Website
As we mention later, in Chapter 12, we’ve built a Website to complement the text. You’ll find it at
http://www.systemsguild.com/riskology
We have placed some tools there to help your risk management effort, and we will endeavor to keep the site updated as we learn about new risk management tools or news on the subject.
Our Title
Our title is taken from a song included in The Cat in the Hat Songbook, by Dr. Seuss.1 The song tells of Uncle Terwilliger, who every Saturday night “creeps down our back stairs,/sneaks out of our house to go waltzing with bears.”
1 Dr. Seuss and Eugene Poddany, The Cat in the Hat Songbook (New York: Random House, 1967).
Uncle T. is a willing risk taker—we can only hope that he has a workable understanding of risk assessment, containment, and mitigation. If so, he is a perfect model for managers of risky software projects, people who may need to dance on occasion with a few bears of their own.