Top Risk Management Concerns

Bernardo Antunes, PMP is a project manager in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil.

  Estimating   Risk Management  

According to my professional experience, the most challenging area of complex projects is risk management since it may significantly impact the main areas of the project. I am an engineer currently working as a project manager, and I have worked in electrical engineering and software projects over the past nine years—and have constantly faced risk management.

Background
Huge projects always demand deep planning or re-planning of the scope, cost, time, quality and resources, evaluating deviations from the original plan and budget. This analysis is then concluded, taking into consideration historical data and/or issues already incurred and quantified —but also an amount of uncertain issues that we need to estimate and quantify properly.

Even more difficult for companies are big projects based on lump sum (fixed price) contracts, in which there are frequently many scope changes and delays in the schedule. These are often hard to measure with precision, and it’s also difficult to establish responsibility to one specific part (the purchaser, supplier, government or other external entity).

For instance, you might find yourself in a scenario where the market (the external environment) starts to change dramatically. The companies that impress a high level of risk analysis have better chances of surviving the crisis. They do this through mitigation of the …

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