Managing Risk in Complex Projects

Known globally as The Risk Doctor, David has been working in risk management for about 30 years. He has worked in 48 countries on every continent except the Antarctic (too cold!), with clients in most industries.

  Risk Management   ProjectsAtWork  

Complex projects feature interconnections and dependencies that create unpredictability and particular types of unforeseeable or emergent risks. To cope with these special challenges, we must go beyond traditional risk management processes and develop flexibility and resilience at multiple levels.

Complex projects are not the same as other “ordinary” projects, and so they need to be managed differently. Projects can be described as complex if their structure leads to inherently unpredictable behavior. This unpredictability produces a particular type of emergent risk which cannot be addressed using the traditional project risk management process.

Instead, we need to develop flexibility and resilience at all levels in order to cope with the special risk challenges associated with complexity. When we consider the risk angle, there are three questions to answer:

1. Are complex projects inherently different from other projects?

Complexity is a continuous variable, so it might be hard to tell if a particular project is complex or not. Complexity is not just a function of scale — a project can be large but simple, or small and complex. Instead, complexity arises from the structure of the project and the way its elements relate together. It involves unpredictability, where it is not always clear how a change in one part might influence other parts. …

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