Summary: Putting It All Together - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 393

Fig. 14.7 Figure 7.1 from Pew and Mavor ( 2007 ) revised to show the approximate range of use
of several methodologies across the development process. Reprinted with permission from the
National Academy of Sciences, courtesy of the National Academies Press

There are two major areas of risk, however, that system developers and man-
agers seem to be less aware of:

• The risks that arise from not giving appropriate consideration to all of the
system stakeholders
• The risks that arise from not considering humans as part of the system.

Developers and managers are probably not effectively addressing these risks
because they believe the risks have low probability or only lead to very minor
consequences, perhaps because they lack formal training in these areas. 1 We
believe that the developers and managers more fundamentally do not recognize the
potential threat to the system's success from these two major areas of risk. Thus,
we can either educate the managers, or provide other ways to highlight risks
outside their expertise. It may be useful to bring in outside experts to evaluate the
risks. The corollary of this is that it is probably worthwhile to include outside
experts in the evaluation of all risks. They are likely to have greater awareness of a
wider range of risks across a wider range of contexts, and to be more objective
with respect to the project, so they will help to make the evaluation more
comprehensive.
Irrespective of whether you are following some version of the Spiral Model
(such as the ICM or RD-ICM) or any other life cycle model (waterfall, V-model,
and so on), it is important that all stakeholders are considered. It is also important

1

Engineers will see engineering risks, accountants accounting risks, and human factors

engineers HF risks.