Definition
Whack-A-Mole, literally, is a classic arcade game where players use a mallet to hit plastic moles that pop up randomly from holes on the game board. The objective is to hit as many moles as possible within a set time limit, earning points for each successful hit.
In the context of Project Management, the term “Whack-A-Mole” is also used metaphorically to describe the risk where solving one problem leads to another problem (either being found or is hidden) popping up, much like the moles in the game
Meanwhile , R028 is the code assigned to one of the Risk Types which will usually be found within a Project. The code R028 is a DDM Terminology which is only used within our company (Diamond Digital Marketing)
Example of the Risk – Whack a Mole
Imagine if you are a web developer that when your client told you that their website is under risk of being hacked, you then deliberately install a firewall to enhance the security of the website. While you have successfully solved one problem (i.e. enhance the security level of the website), at the same time the Marketing Executive who is responsible for updating the content of the website reported to you that he cannot login the backend of the website again due to the fact that the IP address of his computer is not in the security whitelist.
How to tackle Whack-a-Mole Risk
Infact, it is very hard for us to avoid a Whack-a-Mole Risk. While the problem you are going to fix is obvious, the “Another Pop-up” problem that comes after the fixed problem is always hard to predict and observe.
Most of the time , we don’t even know that the “Another” problem is caused by the 1st problem. Compared with solving a problem ,addressing the causal relationships of 2 events among thousands of events is always the hardest part of solving a problem.
To tackle a Whack-a-Mole problem, we can:
- Keep Activity Log – Have a habit of always recording every single step before you fix a bug / solve a problem. Whenever the “Whale-a-Mole” problem occured, we can trace back every single step so as to address the which step is actually the cause of that Whale-a-Mole problem. Due to the fact that to “recording every single steps” (i.e. Activity Log) is a time consuming procedure and your client will not recognize your detailed mind, you probably will spend all of your time focusing on solving the problem instead of recording. However, “recording” is just an insurance – It only does matter whenever there is a matter. You can regard the time you spent on “recording every single step” as an insurance cost. If you don’t pay for the insurance cost (which is affordable), you will pay for the total loss if the “problem” happened. The rule of thumb is that you can spend around 5% of the time of the whole production lead time to keep the activity log. Not go fast, but go far as 1st priority.
- Keep Error Library – As we said before, as there is no way we can predict all the Whack-a-mole problem , another way we can handle this Whack-a-Mole problem is that we establish an Error Library to record all the Whack-a-Mole problem which address the causal relationship between 2 events. While we cannot avoid the 1st Whack-a-Mole problem, we can avoid the 2nd by referring to the Error Library.
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