Using risk reversal to design OSS

There’s a concept in sales called “risk reversal” that takes all of the customers’ likely issues with a product and provides answers to alleviate customer concerns. I believe we can apply the same concept to OSS, not just to sell them, but to design them.

To borrow from a risk register page here on PAOSS, the major categories of risk that appear on almost all OSS projects are:

  • Organisational change management – the OSS will touch almost all parts of a business and a large number of people within the organisation. If all parts of the business is not conditioned to the change then the implementation will not be successful even if the technical deliverables are faultless. Change management has many, many layers but one way to minimise change management is to make the products and processes highly intuitive. I feel that intuitive OSS will come from a focus on design and simplification rather than our current focus on constantly adding more features. The aim should be to create OSS that are as easy for operators to start using as office tools like spreadsheets, word processors, presentation applications, etc
  • Data integrity – the OSS is only as good as good as the data that is being fed to it. If the quality of data in the OSS database is poor then operational staff will quickly lose faith in the tools. The product-based techniques that can be used to overcome this risk include:
    • Design tools / data model to cope with poor data quality, but also flag it as low confidence for future repair
    • Reduction in data relationships / dependencies (ie referential integrity) to ensure that quality problems don’t have a domino effect on OSS usability
    • Building checks and balances that ensure the data can be reconciled and quality remains high
    • Incorporate closed-loop processes to ensure data quality is continually improved, rather than the open-loop processes that tend to lead to data quality degradation
  • Application functionality mapping to real business needs – OSS have been around long enough to have all but run out of features for vendors to differentiate against. The truly useful functionality has arisen from real business needs. “Wish-list” functionality that adds little tangible business benefit or requires significant effort is just adding product and project risk
  • Northbound Interface / Integration – Costs and risks of integrations are significant on each OSS project. There are many techniques that can be used to reduce risk such as a Minimum Viable Data (ie less data types to collect across an interface), standardised destination mapping models, etc but the industry desperately needs major innovation here
  • Implementation – there are so many sources of risk within this category, as is to be expected on any large, complex project. Taking the PMP approach to risk reduction, we can apply the Triple Constraint model

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