A Risk Buffer for Human Weaknesses

First, a little background. My theory that stupidity, greed, and laziness are built into us by nature, God, and social circumstances seems to find fresh confirmation in real projects every day.

I will not go into the reasons behind that conclusion. I do not particularly want to, and they are beside the point. My idea of the week is that planning any project’s budget and timeline should begin, in part, with assembling the project team, because schedule and financial risks depend on the specific people involved.

Based on experience, I used to add roughly 15–20% to almost any project schedule as a risk buffer, and typically 20–30% to the expected cost. In practice, I was wrong and underestimated the risks almost every time. Two reasons: (a) I did not realistically assess the team or its motivation, and (b) I estimated other people’s work as if I were doing it myself, based on my own experience with similar tasks.

I propose introducing stupidity, laziness, and greed coefficients for prospective project team members, then multiplying the usual risk-buffer values by those factors. As a formula: final risk buffer = base risk buffer × Ks × Kl × Kg, where Ks is the stupidity coefficient, Kl is the laziness coefficient, and Kg is the greed coefficient.

This is not a complete method yet, just a working hypothesis. But it could be developed into a simple scale: 0.8 = a factor that reduces risk; 1.0 = neutral; 1.2 = moderate risk; 1.5 = high risk; and 2.0 = critical risk.

See a project team with an indecent amount of management? Raise a coefficient. See outstanding technical people with portfolios of similar projects and glowing client reviews? Raise the greed coefficient, perhaps, but lower the stupidity coefficient. The point is not to insult anybody. It is to stop pretending the team is a neutral variable. The team itself is one of the biggest sources of project risk. So there you have it: a rather undercooked idea, but it is what it is. There is a like button at the bottom of the page, if you are not too lazy or too stingy to use it ;)

P.S. “Stupidity coefficient” is a deliberately blunt name for the risk of insufficient competence. “Laziness coefficient” means weak motivation and poor execution discipline. “Greed coefficient” means opportunistic behavior and inflated costs.