Seeing Star Wars

Well like everyone else in this country, I went with my family to seethe new  Star Wars movie over the holiday week at the Imax theater. The movie is 2:30 long and at 2:20 during the final battle scene the theater stopped the movie and turned on the lights. They then proceeded to tell us that the bathroom had flooded and we all had to exit immediately. Needless to say children were crying and many adults were yelling.  We actually had to look up online how the movie ended when we got back home.

I guess the lesson here is that, similar to our programs, there will always be unplanned risks and issues that arise that we need to react to. In this case, the bathroom flooding was out of our control and we just had to deal with it. Not sure what we could have done, but on our programs we can do several things to better prepare for unplanned issues…

• Have a well organized plan with dependencies so when risks or issues do arise the team can quickly understand the impact on timelines
• Have good tracking and reporting so that early indicators of risks or trends can be found which allows for more time to take action
• Have documented contingency plans so that the team has thought through what actions would be taken in specific scenarios

So the lesson is that there will always be surprises but we can plan for ways to better react when they arise. Note that after several messages we did get free movie passes from the company so they did attempt to remediate the problem. Now I just need another excuse to wear my Chewbacca outfit….