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Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects

by Tom DeMarco (Author), Timothy Lister (Author)
4.2 out of 5 stars 124 ratings
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Any software project that's worth starting will be vulnerable to risk. Since greater risks bring greater rewards, a company that runs away from risk will soon find itself lagging behind its more adventurous competition.

By ignoring the threat of negative outcomes—in the name of positive thinking or a Can-Do attitude—software managers drive their organizations into the ground.

In Waltzing with Bears, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister—the best-selling authors of Peopleware—show readers how to identify and embrace worthwhile risks. Developers are then set free to push the limits.

You'll find that risk management

* makes aggressive risk-taking possible
* protects management from getting blindsided
* provides minimum-cost downside protection
* reveals invisible transfers of responsibility
* isolates the failure of a subproject.

Readers are taught to identify the most common risks faced by software projects:

* schedule flaws
* requirements inflation
* turnover
* specification breakdown
* and under-performance.

Packed with provocative insights, real-world examples, and project-saving tips, Waltzing with Bears is your guide to mitigating the risks—before they turn into problems.

Read more
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  1. ISBN-10
    0932633609
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0932633606
  3. Publisher
    Dorset House
  4. Publication date
    January 1, 2003
  5. Language
    English
  6. Dimensions
    5.75 x 0.5 x 8.75 inches
  7. Print length
    144 pages
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Editorial Reviews

Review

" . . . destined to become the Bible for serious IT professionals and project managers." -- Edward Yourdon

"Advice projects must not ignore (but often do) . . . A must for the project manager (and his or her boss)." -- Conrad Weisert, IDINews

"Bold, provocative yet coolly pragmatic . . ." -- Michael Schrage, Co-Director of MIT Media Lab s e-Markets Initiative, Author of Serious Play

"The book is a brilliant tour de force. . . . should be on your bookshelf . . . ." -- Paul Gray, Information Systems Management

"The seminal work on managing software project risk. . . . Finally we have a guide to risk management . . . ." -- Rob Austin, Professor, Harvard Business School

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Dorset House
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 1, 2003
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 144 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0932633609
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0932633606
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.4 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.75 x 0.5 x 8.75 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 out of 5 stars 124 ratings

About the authors

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  1. Tim Lister

    Tim Lister

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  2. Tom DeMarco

    Tom DeMarco

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    Tom DeMarco is the author of sixteen published books, including five novels, a collection of short stories, and the rest books about systems technology and the sociology of the workplace.

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Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
124 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • BlueHooker
    5.0 out of 5 stars A necessity for *developers*
    Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2006
    Verified Purchase
    Read this unsystematic and occasionally glib book (I concede this point to other reviewers) and you will suddenly realize that you, your colleagues in development, your technical leads, and your CEO have probably all been lying to yourselves and to each other about every single "milestone". Risk analysis is not merely done badly most of the time. It's usually not done at all. I learned enough from this book on a Sunday to return to work the next day and successfully persuade my colleagues that our project plan was worthless, and we needed to come up with a new one *now* that properly took account of the risks. No, I'm not a risk analyst, but merely the effort of thinking about risk in a different way had a payoff. Before this, we were just driving blind.
    11 people found this helpful
    Helpful
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  • Amazon Customer
    4.0 out of 5 stars Great read
    Reviewed in the United States on June 24, 2014
    Verified Purchase
    The book is great for anyone who wants to get structured thoughts around risk management. For seasoned program managers, it may not have much new; however, it walks one through the process. It also challenges you to look inside your organization to see what level of risk management is being followed, how to improve it and how to build accountability from all stakeholders involved (& not just development teams).

    If you think you are an expert on software risk management, then perhaps you don't need to read this. Else, its a pretty good book to have,
    2 people found this helpful
    Helpful
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  • Mouneer Rabie
    5.0 out of 5 stars very insightful and practical on risks of software
    Reviewed in the United States on June 10, 2013
    Verified Purchase
    very insightful, concise, and practical reading on understanding , and dealing with risks of software projects; the contents are universal and apply to projects of any size. a must read for product managers and project managers (who are not freakishly PMP-y).
    Helpful
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  • Bill Lynch
    5.0 out of 5 stars Using Risk Management to gain an advantage
    Reviewed in the United States on March 10, 2014
    Verified Purchase
    In a lot of organizations risk management has become a burdensome process that simply slows everything down. DeMarco and Lister have done a terrific job creating a conscious and deliberate process that will create a practical amount of management while increasing the chances of actually delivering the project on time. This book should be a mandatory read for anyone managing moderate to high risk projects.
    One person found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • Ron Janusz
    5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
    Reviewed in the United States on August 27, 2015
    Verified Purchase
    A great read, if a little heavy. But full of great information and views.
    Helpful
     Report
  • Andrew Johnston
    4.0 out of 5 stars A good book covering an important and negelected area
    Reviewed in the United States on September 27, 2003
    This book is an interesting mix. It starts with a philosophical discussion of why it is ethically wrong and success-endangering to ignore risks, but commercially weak to simply avoid them, thus establishing that we must accept and manage risk. The book then develops a comprehensive method for risk management in IT (or other) projects.
    It may be surprising where DeMarco & Lister start from, explaining what risk is, why we need to accept it and why we must manage it, but they explain how common attitudes in the IT industry, which they correctly term "pathologies", can make it almost impossible to properly acknowledge and manage risks.
    Maybe it's my background as a physicist, but I assumed that most project managers understand the concept of uncertainty in estimates of cost, timescale and benefits. The authors clearly start from the opposite position. This may be a little off-putting for some readers, but will definitely help those to whom this is a new concept, while the use of "uncertainty diagrams" (probability profiles) will be a useful addition to the toolkit even for those more familiar with the underlying ideas.
    The book is very strong on how risk impacts budget and schedule, and how to more scientifically make goals and committed targets more realistic. There's a very good discussion of how to assess deadlines using probability theory, which shows the folly of trying to manage large efforts by single deadlines. The book also includes a very good section on brainstorming and analysing different stakeholders' "win" conditions to identify potential risks.
    One weakness is the almost total lack of discussion of risk prevention - actively working to prevent a risk materialising, or at least to reduce its probability as well as mitigating its impact. For example they quote the example of an operating system upgrade which is incompatible with a "make or break" product development. Any sensible manager would work with the OS vendor and its developer information programmes to actively prevent this, rather than just worrying about its possible impact.
    When it comes to combining the effects of multiple risks, the authors rely entirely on Monte-Carlo simulation and the "black box" outputs from a spreadsheet (which is downloadable from a web site for the book). This will be a useful tool, but a simple worked example showing the mathematical principles at work would be much better (see [...] risks.htm for my attempt at this).
    The book is dismissive of time-constrained scheduling as "schedule flaw", and there is only limited consideration of methods such as Agile Modeling and eXtreme Programming which aim to mitigate or even prevent the effects of requirements change. However there is a good section on the use of incremental delivery to mitigate risk, but possibly somewhat unrealistic in relying on very complete requirements and design before the incremental delivery plan can be completed.
    The approach to benefits, and the importance of properly assessing and measuring benefit is excellent. As DeMarco and Lister state, you can't do any meaningful risk management or prioritisation unless costs and benefits are estimated, measured and controlled to almost exactly the same degree. Conversely, if you can build realistic models of both cost and benefit in risk terms, you have a very powerful but relatively simple model for project prioritisation.
    Overall this is a good book which I can recommend, but not the definitive answer I expected from the authors of "Peopleware".
    64 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English
  • Mrs. AS Goodwin
    5.0 out of 5 stars A Brilliant computer science textbook
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 29, 2009
    Verified Purchase
    I have tended to find that the smaller computer science textbooks are actually better than the inch thick that are more common. This is a very small book for CS but good things often come in small packages as with this book. If you want to know about software engineering in a short space of time then read this as opposed to Sommerville's Software Engineering mammoth tome.
    Report
  • Raj M
    5.0 out of 5 stars Risk Management
    Reviewed in Canada on November 28, 2019
    Verified Purchase
    Good Book
    Report
  • Tigger
    4.0 out of 5 stars Inhalt gut, Qualität des Einbandes mittel
    Reviewed in Germany on January 9, 2016
    Verified Purchase
    Über den Inhalt kann ich nicht viel sagen, da es ein Geschenk war.

    Der Einband ist von der Qualität nicht besonders hochwertig - die Ecken waren bei Lieferung auch abgestoßen. Der Umtausch ging zwar problemlos, aber hat nur wenig gebracht da auch das zweite Buch etwas mitgenommen aussah. Scheint generell an der Verarbeitung zu liegen. Der Preis erscheint hierfür sehr hoch.
    Report
  • Stephan Wiesner
    3.0 out of 5 stars nothing new
    Reviewed in Germany on June 18, 2004
    Verified Purchase
    If you have read Deadline (DeMarco's best book by far), you will find nothing new.
    Otherwise the book might be fun to read (if you don't have to pay the large price, which it clearly is not worth). Don't expect to do better risk management afterwards, though. Curves don't need to be 'nice and smooth' to make their point and his scientific methods are no better than an 'Nutzwertanalyse' (taking the average of a lot of guesses and thinking that this will result in an absolute measure of truth).
    Report
  • Andrew Johnston
    4.0 out of 5 stars A good book covering an important and negelected area
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 27, 2003
    Verified Purchase
    This book is an interesting mix. It starts with a philosophical discussion of why it is ethically wrong and success-endangering to ignore risks, but commercially weak to simply avoid them, thus establishing that we must accept and manage risk. The book then develops a comprehensive method for risk management in IT (or other) projects.
    It may be surprising where DeMarco & Lister start from, explaining what risk is, why we need to accept it and why we must manage it, but they explain how common attitudes in the IT industry, which they correctly term "pathologies", can make it almost impossible to properly acknowledge and manage risks.
    Maybe it's my background as a physicist, but I assumed that most project managers understand the concept of uncertainty in estimates of cost, timescale and benefits. The authors clearly start from the opposite position. This may be a little off-putting for some readers, but will definitely help those to whom this is a new concept, while the use of "uncertainty diagrams" (probability profiles) will be a useful addition to the toolkit even for those more familiar with the underlying ideas.
    The book is very strong on how risk impacts budget and schedule, and how to more scientifically make goals and committed targets more realistic. There's a very good discussion of how to assess deadlines using probability theory, which shows the folly of trying to manage large efforts by single deadlines. The book also includes a very good section on brainstorming and analysing different stakeholders' "win" conditions to identify potential risks.
    One weakness is the almost total lack of discussion of risk prevention - actively working to prevent a risk materialising, or at least to reduce its probability as well as mitigating its impact. For example they quote the example of an operating system upgrade which is incompatible with a "make or break" product development. Any sensible manager would work with the OS vendor and its developer information programmes to actively prevent this, rather than just worrying about its possible impact.
    When it comes to combining the effects of multiple risks, the authors rely entirely on Monte-Carlo simulation and the "black box" outputs from a spreadsheet (which is downloadable from a web site for the book). This will be a useful tool, but a simple worked example showing the mathematical principles at work would be much better (see [...] risks.htm for my attempt at this).
    The book is dismissive of time-constrained scheduling as "schedule flaw", and there is only limited consideration of methods such as Agile Modeling and eXtreme Programming which aim to mitigate or even prevent the effects of requirements change. However there is a good section on the use of incremental delivery to mitigate risk, but possibly somewhat unrealistic in relying on very complete requirements and design before the incremental delivery plan can be completed.
    The approach to benefits, and the importance of properly assessing and measuring benefit is excellent. As DeMarco and Lister state, you can't do any meaningful risk management or prioritisation unless costs and benefits are estimated, measured and controlled to almost exactly the same degree. Conversely, if you can build realistic models of both cost and benefit in risk terms, you have a very powerful but relatively simple model for project prioritisation.
    Overall this is a good book which I can recommend, but not the definitive answer I expected from the authors of "Peopleware".
    Report