--- title: "It's healthy to be scared of new projects" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/6/17/its-healthy-to-be-scared-of-new-projects.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/6/17/its-healthy-to-be-scared-of-new-projects.html" published: "2004-06-17T20:10:00" updated: "2004-06-17T20:10:00" tags: ["Project Management"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "I think it's healthy to be afraid of new projects. Really. Whenever I get a new assignment, when I just get the first sentences of the project description, and I don't know how I'm going to implement it yet, I get those…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # It's healthy to be scared of new projects By Roy Osherove June 17, 2004 In [Project Management](https://osherove.com/blog/category/project-management) **Historical article** · Originally published June 17, 2004; technical details may be outdated. I think it's healthy to be afraid of new projects. Really. Whenever I get a new assignment, when I just get the first sentences of the project description, and I don't know how I'm going to implement it yet, I get those totally human thoughts burning in me: "How the **hell** are we supposed to do that??", "Are they nuts?", "They want **that** to do **this**???" and so on. To me these are totally healthy thoughts. There's a phrase - _"Fear is the best protection mechanism. It keeps us on our toes"_. If you're going into a project with a totally peaceful mind and you think you know exactly how its going to end up or what you're going to do - you're preparing yourself for a nasty surprise. There are no guarantees in life. _Especially_ in the software industry. 70-80% of all software projects world wide are either failing miserably at hitting the target end date or being cancelled all together. It is **that** unpredictable. Mostly because of the way we are used to doing things. Even the best of us. Agile methodologies try to solve this problem with various countermeasures. They also succeed - to a degree. But no one can ever tell themselves "this is going to be just fine and dandy. I have nothing to worry about". na-ah. Managing project risks is all about doing the worries beforehand and taking care of the "what happens if"s before the happen. That's a healthy worry. If you're not worried when you start a project - you better start. And you better not stop worrying until you actually finish it , ship it and... wait - now you need to ship version 2.0, don't you? :) let the vicious circle begin. ## More in Project Management [All posts in Project Management](https://osherove.com/blog/category/project-management) - Dec 8, 2004 ### [Chatting with Johanna Rothman](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/12/8/chatting-with-johanna-rothman.html) - Sep 3, 2004 ### [Great Coders Deserve Great Managers](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/9/3/great-coders-deserve-great-managers.html) - Jun 17, 2004 ### [Communicating Project Progress with a white board](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/6/17/communicating-project-progress-with-a-white-board.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/