Losing your suitcase.

The risk of travel

My wife tells me I travel a lot.

757,337 lifetime with United.
105,896 miles last year.
Oh, and 1 lightning strike on Monday in Houston.

Don't lose your suitcase

The last major trip I went on was to Europe. My boss last saw his suitcase in NY en route to Denmark through Spain (don't ask!).

We had a customer meeting first thing Monday morning.

In Denmark on Sunday night he was lucky to find a tailor in the hotel - hopefully he got paid back by the airline because it wasn't what I would call cheap.

How to manage the risk

Here's an interesting travel tip: when traveling as a group share essentials between different suitcases.

That way if one suitcase is lost - it's not all or nothing for the lucky traveler.

There is a lesson here for mitigating risk in Change

1. Ensure that you have a backout plan. If you don't you are sure to need it. If you do need it, it will waste time and resource to develop, unless you can quickly backup and recover.
2. Architecturally share risk - manage how data / workloads are shared between storage and servers. That way a minor modification to a tier 4 app doesn't risk a tier 1 business service.
3. Manage the payload of Changes. If you group a lot of changes together, you're more likely to want to proceed for a major win - but one small error for a "minor" change could risk success.