Risk Management - A Cautionary Tale

Mr. Ghost writes "By now many people have heard about the fiasco and financial blunder Comair had over the 2004 Christmas holiday. An article on CIO provides a timeline of the decisions that led up to the system failure costing the division of Delta Airlines $20 million. The article points out the need for proper risk management and what can occur when a risk analysis is not performed or ignored. It goes on to mention that although this was a very public failure, this type of system failure can occur in other companies." From the article: "The prospect of replacing the ever-maturing crew management system was floated again the following year, with plans laid out to select a vendor in 2000. But that didn't happen. Over the next several years, Comair's corporate leadership was distracted by a sequence of tumultuous events..."

Comments

Blowing smoke up your donkey

[Anonymous Coward]

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Posts above this line have not RTFA.

Re:Blowing smoke up your donkey

[Anonymous Coward]

Posts under this line haven't RTFA either.
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Re:Why didn't the CIO yell louder?

[winkydink]

...The PM and CIO has to learn to be a salesman, negotiator and technocrat all at the same time.

How is this different from what a good PM or CIO does every day? Darrell Hamilton is a "Strategic Director"? Strategic Director of what? Blame avoidance & CYA?

Re:Yep

[Zemplar]

"I wonder if this was a hw limit or a sw limit..."

I can assure you it was indeed a hardware or software limit.

/.ed

[christoofar]

Wow. Looks like even the mag for CIOs can't keep up with a /. DDoS attack. Maybe the CIO for CIO should be fired?

It's a legacy system

[morryveer]

Legacy == Bad, gonna die, just like dear Grandad. Should've rewritten it in Java, that'd fix it!

Re:Yep

[tomhudson]

Hindsight is 20/20.

You mean like this story (the lesson being that what seems like a good thing at the time can become an unmitigated disaster):

I like monkeys.

The pet store was selling them for five cents a piece. I thought that
odd since they were normally a couple thousand each. I decided not to
look a gift horse in the mouth. I bought 200. I like monkeys.

I took my 200 monkeys home. I have a big car. I let one drive. His
name was Sigmund. He was retarded. In fact, none of them were really
bright. They kept punching themselves in their genitals. I laughed.
Then they punched my genitals. I stopped laughing.

I herded them into my room. They didn't adapt very well to their new
environment. They would screech, hurl themselves off of the couch at
high speeds and slam into the wall. Although humorous at first, the
spectacle lost its novelty halfway into its third hour.

Two hours later I found out why all the monkeys were so inexpensive:
they all died. No apparent reason. They all just sorta' dropped dead.
Kinda' like when you buy a goldfish and it dies five hours later. Damn
cheap monkeys.

I didn't know what to do. There were 200 dead monkeys lying all over my
room, on the bed, in the dresser, hanging from my bookcase. It looked
like I had 200 throw rugs.

I tried to flush one down the toilet. It didn't work. It got stuck.
Then I had one dead, wet monkey and 199 dead, dry monkeys.

I tried pretending that they were just stuffed animals. That worked for
a while, that is until they began to decompose. It started to smell real
bad.

I had to pee but there was a dead monkey in the toilet and I didn't want
to call the plumber. I was embarrassed.

I tried to slow down the decomposition by freezing them. Unfortunately
there was only enough room for two monkeys at a time so I had to change
them every 30 seconds. I also had to eat all the food in the freezer so
it didn't all go bad.

I tried burning them. Little did I know my bed was flammable. I had to
extinguish the fire.

Then I had one dead, wet monkey in my toilet, two dead, frozen monkeys in
my freezer, and 197 dead, charred monkeys in a pile on my bed. The odor
wasn't improving.

I became agitated at my inability to dispose of my monkeys and to use the
bathroom. I severely beat one of my monkeys. I felt better.

I tried throwing them way but the garbage man said that the city wasn't
allowed to dispose of charred primates. I told him that I had a wet
one. He couldn't take that one either. I didn't bother asking about the
frozen ones.

finally arrived at a solution. I gave them out as Christmas gifts. My
friends didn't know quite what to say. They pretended that they like
them but I could tell they were lying. Ingrates. So I punched them in
the genitals.

I like monkeys

Same thing with the code in question. It seemed good when it was written, but it didn't stand the test of time, and ended up with a lot of people getting a swift kick in the you-know-whats.

Or for another example of hindsight and the law of unanticipated consequences, just sing the first few bars of "Alice's Restaurant".

Re:Yep

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry - I mistakenly drifted into the IT section of slashdot... You IT guys are all so threatened by real developers! (since you're all just developer want-a-bee's) And a female developer - that's the scariest of all! I won't make this mistake again... I wouldn't want to subject you to crying in the fetal position.

Indeed I already am.

Thank god women in IT usually rise quickly due to their "social skills" (wink-wink, nudge-nudge), so they end up in management where the harm they can do is limited to administrative errors, i.e. they won't destroy real work.