A Risk Management Partnership

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Risk Management   ProjectsAtWork  

Organizational risk management requires alignment across all levels of execution, including project, programs, portfolios and the PMO. This includes consistent reporting and approval processes as well as a culture that facilitates communication among team members, senior executives and stakeholders.

In this series on organizational risk management, we have explored the concepts of constraints hierarchy and risk capacity, profiles and reserves. The next step is to consider specific actions that organizations can take to manage risk. But first let’s discuss the need to develop a risk management partnership. This is the alignment of all risk management activities across the organization and is critical to an efficient and effective organizational risk management approach.

Organizational risk management involves all levels of the project execution framework — the PMO as well as portfolio, program and project management functions. However, to be successful there needs to be a single cohesive approach to managing risks — not a set of different approaches that hopefully work together. That means that the organization needs a partnership between these different project areas that addresses two distinct aspects:

1. The processes that occur at the different levels of project execution. The processes need to complement one another and ensure that there is …

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