Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Owning Up to Risk
Poor risk management is the culprit on many failed projects, but is the project manager solely responsible? Companies such as Marathon Oil are integrating automated tools into the process to assign ownership of risk issues, assess them quantitatively and qualitatively, and then manage them throughout the project lifecycle.
Historically, project managers have not always been good risk managers. The reason? They haven’t had the proper methodology for measuring risks, assigning ownership to them and structuring appropriate mitigation plans for dealing with them.
Turning away from an honest, accurate evaluation of risk was not a possibility for Jim Christie, manager of project controls at Houston-based Marathon Oil Company. With ever-increasing expenditures of time and money on the line, his firm — the fourth-largest, U.S.-based fully integrated international energy company engaged in exploration and production — needed to ensure it could make early decisions on projects. And Christie needed to ensure corporate management that the decision his team had made was the right one.
“We used to approach risk management deterministically, using our best guesses of most likely outcomes. We had ranges of sensitivity, like determining what would happen if the oil market price went up, or contracting costs went up, but we had no way of determining which…
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"Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining." - Jeff Raskin |