Do you have a plan in case something goes wrong in your project?

Let's say a key team member accepts a position at another company. Are you prepared to reallocate her tasks to someone else? Is there someone else who could take over?

Or, let's say the 5 more people that human resources were to hire for your team take longer than expected. Will your project still be on time without them? What are you going to do: overwork the people that are there, negotiate a new deadline?

It's not about being pessimistic, but about being prepared. About knowing where the project could be endangered and thinking about how you're going to deal with that.

Often, we don't want to think about those risks, because we are confident that we will succeed, and because we don't want to "jinx" it. But not planning ahead your risk management strategy is playing with fire. With risk management, you will be able to deal with potentially disastrous issues better, because you thought of what to do beforehand, not in the heat of the moment.