First Things First

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Hi everybody! This is my first post, so I think I should introduce myself and some of the topics I’d like to discuss in this blog. My name is Guilherme Calôba and I am from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I am an Industrial Engineer, a multi-purpose kind of professional that, as we say in Brazil, “plays in the eleven positions in a soccer game”.

I have built an academic career prior to working in a company in a full time job. My time with the university was excellent and I had the opportunity to deal with several companies during this period of my life.

I was introduced to risk in 1998 and I’ve been working with that ever since. I took my Master’s and my Doctor’s degree in Operations Research and, after that, I started working in an oil and gas company.

My experience with projects begun there, and I did a specialization course and did my PMP exam. I am a proud Project Management Professional since 2008! I started out in the R&D center, moving up to the exploration and production area, where I currently make my moves. Most of my latest work involves scheduling and quantitative risk assessments, lots of Monte Carlo simulations, but I am truly fascinated by the whole process, the integration between qualitative and quantitative and the tools we can use to better represent, analyze and support decision-making.

I said it many times; risk is a beautiful thing, as long as it helps the project. It helps when you are protecting yourself from threats, it helps when you are embracing opportunities and it certainly helps when you have a few courses of action and you need to choose just one.

Among the topics I am considering covering on this blog, we have:

• Qualitative Risk Analysis;
• Quantitative Risk Analysis;
• Risk Integration;
• Financial evaluation of projects;
• Decision Support tools, their use and abuse;
• Expert Opinion on Risk Analysis;
• Perception, Bias and Decision Making;
• among others

I would like really appreciate your input on your favorite topics to address here. As anything in Project Management, this blog can only gain with your valuable contribution. I will try to keep my contributions here shorter than the white papers I’m publishing (you can check them out, too!)

To finish this first post, I would like to add a little something.  

This blog went live July 26^th and as of today, July 31^st, I hadn’t posted anything yet. So, you see, it was a risk free environment. I had nothing in it, that is, nothing ventured and, of course, nothing gained. Completely stable, boring and void. Nobody came to see, obviously! Nobody wants to see a blank page when they come for information, and nobody wants (to be part, to sponsor, to be a stakeholder, to manage) a project with no objectives, no goals and no deliverables.

What I am trying to say here is that when you take on a project, a venture, a business opportunity, you are already subject to risk. You could easily put your money on a low yield investment (or under your mattress) and have no financial risk whatsoever. But companies do not grow doing so, projects don’t flourish without a little risk taking and the humanity cannot thrive without considering that results, broadly speaking, may be quite different from what we expect them to be. Risk is life, encompassing uncertainty, opportunities, threats, all of that. Not so boring, for sure!

Thank you for reading! I appreciate your feedback on this and I hope you suggest more themes for us to discuss!