Organizational Risk And Your Project

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  

How do strategic or organizational risk processes integrate with project-level risk management without causing duplication of effort or confusion? Let’s consider three categories of interaction between the organization’s portfolio and its individual projects.

Over the past few articles in this series I have looked at organizational risk management at the portfolio and program levels. The next logical step is to consider organizational risk and projects, which has the potential to become more complicated. Risk management is already established as a core part of project execution so there is a chance that organizational processes may cause duplication of effort and/or confusion. At the same time, we cannot ignore organizational risk at the project level because projects are where the majority of portfolio work is carried out, and projects are where the impacts of organizational risks are ultimately felt.

There are three categories of interactions between organizational risk management and projects. Let’s look at each:

1. Portfolio and program driven change

Portfolio and program driven change is likely to impact a project as a result of either risk management activities or the implementation of contingency at higher levels of the portfolio. Those actions will drive tangible change into one or more projects:

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