Starting Out in Project Management by Association for project management;

Author:Association for project management; [Management, Association for Project]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Association for Project Management
Published: 2018-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

Risks to project objectives

A risk is an uncertain situation or event that may occur, which, if it does, will impact on one or more of the project’s objectives, e.g. time, cost, quality or another of the project’s success criteria. A key responsibility of the project manager is to understand individual risks (situations or events that may occur) and manage them to optimise the effect on the project and its stakeholders. Current thinking in project management is that risks can be both threats, i.e. things that would jeopardise the ability to meet objectives if they occurred, or opportunities, i.e. things that would enhance the ability to meet objectives if they occurred. The project manager also needs to think about overall project risk (as opposed to individual risky events). This will be explored further later in the chapter.

There is often confusion between project risks and project issues. Both risks and issues affect project objectives but a risk is something that might happen and an issue is something that is happening, i.e. there is no uncertainty. Issue management is covered in Chapter 23.

Any project that is undertaken will contain risks because no one can reliably know what might happen in the future. Just as no one knows what numbers will win the Lotto next week, no one knows exactly how a project will turn out. The purpose of risk management is to make projects less of a lottery so that achievement of specific objectives for change is more certain.

Typical risks on projects often relate to uncertain resource availability or uncertainties about the environment in which the project will take place. Examples of risks in these areas might be as follows:

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