Breaking the back of the risk log

A number of our team, including myself, woke to find we had no water or at most a dribble today. This made taking a shower, brushing teeth, having a shave, take quite a bit longer than usual. Lucky I have a stock of bottled water which got me around the essentials, and had enough of a dribble under the shower to eventually get the basics done there too. It was an exercise in patience, If it only would hurry up!

We visited the IBM office in Ghana today, hooray! It' a small office, with about 30 staff, hence we share a building with a number of other companies. Inside, it looks just like any other IBM office, with a reception, 2 meeting rooms, a conference room, the country manager's office, and a couple of open desk areas. It's very nice. They advised us that when IBMers are over here on IBM business, the preferred IBM hotel is the Movenpick Ambassador Hotel - 5 star luxury accommodation! It's got everything! Well, it's a few rungs up the rich list ladder from our hotel, however our hotel is still very nice and the staff couldn't be more helpful.





7th floor views:



Lunch was interesting today, we tried out a place called Papeye, which means something like 'for the good of it', or 'giving alms'. I had their grilled chicken and rice, a very popular dish over here, the chicken is spiced with green pepper and ginger. The fun was when we wanted to leave. We jumped in our car, but someone had decided to parallel park directly behind us, we were boxed in. That's ok in Ghana, there are no rules or road laws for this apparently, no fines needed. We just waited until the patron could be found to move his car, in the meantime another 2 cars had also parallel parked in front of him, boxing in another 3 patrons. No one got upset or angry, it's just another day :). Sitting in the air conditioned comfort of our car, we watched while our driver made the negotiations, and we were free about 15 minutes later.



Outside of that, we finally broke the back of logging our risks today, we now have nearly 200 risks, and have assessed a probability/likelihood number for each of them. We also came up with 7 key risk areas from our SOW to evaluate impact/consequence against, and have therefore also started evaluating consequences. We should finish this by tomorrow, but this stage of risk is more fun than the mental grind of researching and identifying risks. Either tomorrow or next week we will start looking at mitigation and a new round of interviews to confirm risks, analysis ratings, and how our clients suggest the risks should be mitigated.
Sorry, no more news for today - we've been working our brains to exhaustion and fingers to the bone, but it is very satisfying to start to see the art and science coming to life.


- Keep on Rockin'. Dwight.

Location:Eight Rd,Accra,Ghana