Wednesday, August 22, 2007

The PLOP Measurement


For some time I have somewhat tongue in cheek referred to the way that we prioritize work as the PLOP Measurement method. (Patent Pending). In the unending quest to educate and inform here is a quick definition of the PLOP Measurement Method and how you might apply it to your work.




Contrary to what you might initially think PLOP is not just how big of a splash will something make when it falls into the water. PLOP is much deeper than that. PLOP is short for Prioritization by Level Of Pain.

PLOP has gone by many names, methods and approaches for years. Risk Management, Concern Logging, Caveat List and many more have been used. What they all boil down to though is exposing and managing efforts with an acceptable level of risk.

With the PLOP method issues are judged and prioritized by their potential to cause pain. Pain can be felt in any of a number of ways:

  • business impact
  • cost of outage
  • size of effort
  • number of systems touched
  • likelihood of customer impact
  • potential severity level
  • inconvenience of time for roll out (tell me you don't look at something that needs to be released in the middle of the night as higher risk than something that can go in during the day)

Some might dismiss this as a subjective measure and make accusations of pessimism and paranoia. While the paranoia point might be correct, I find as a pessimist I am rarely disappointed. It's something that we do whether we acknowledge it or not. It may not be a hard number but that sinking feeling that you get in the pit of your stomach is usually a really good indicator of how bad the PLOP rating should be. The trick is listening to it and taking the right actions rather than slowing everything to a crawl.