About

Welcome to the Project Risk Management Blog – a resource I hope you will find delivers insight into the practice of Risk Management from a unique perspective.

To start, let’s talk about who I am.  I work for CAI, a private IT services and consulting firm, in a Research Engineering/IP Development capacity. My interest in Risk Management for projects is focused largely on Risk Identification and Risk Measurement (how can you manage a risk if you don’t know what it is or how “big” it is?). My background is industrial and academic – I am currently ABD for a PhD in Information Sciences & Technology at Penn State University, and during my tenure there I also had the opportunity to do consulting work for large clients in a variety of areas of Information Science.

That’s enough history – the more important topic is the collection of assumptions I’m making in writing this blog, so let’s get into them to level-set:

1)    “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”  It’s not my quote, but I do agree (in fact, I’m not sure who it does belong to – in various wordings it’s been attributed to a lot of people, the most common of which seems to be Peter Drucker, and the oldest of which seems to be Galileo Galilei).

2)    Academic research has more to offer industry than many people in industry seem to realize.

3)    Several of the most difficult problems industry has to tackle (Risk being one of them) are research problems at their core.

4)    Academic research isn’t perfect, and in fact, it commonly does not tell a consumer what they can actually do about the problem being reported.

5)    Risk can never be eliminated – and this shouldn’t be our goal.  Our goal should be to know as much about the risk as possible (because this is how we make informed decisions about the risk, i.e. – manage it).

My objective with this blog is to start a conversation about how to make Risk Management a manageable activity for projects. I’ll be pointing readers to current events that give some perspective on Project Risk Management, and also to papers and research efforts that bring new knowledge and methods about Risk to the table.

This is obviously a very big topic, so day-by-day I’ll take on a little bit at a time.

I hope you’ll choose to participate in the conversation, or that you find it useful in the very least.

Quantum Risk

Computer scientists at Queen’s University have developed a new form of chess in which players (including computers) can’t identify a chess piece until they move it. They call it Quantum Chess, and it’s amazing because taking the knowledge of the piece out of the equation actually makes the combination of potential moves incalculable – without being able to project movements based on piece locations, a computer can’t rule out any possible moves, thereby making the total possibilities nearly infinite. You can check out the whole story here.

The story caught my eye because I think it’s so similar to risk management strategies of today. How often do organizations actually know enough about their risks to predict the potential outcomes? Queen’s University worked very hard to take measurement out of the chess equation. We often don’t work hard at all to bring measurement to the project risk equation – as a result, both of our outcomes are pretty much the same: unpredictable.

Fortunately for us, we don’t actually have to work as hard as the CS folks at Queen’s to bring measurement to IT projects. For us, a little bit of measurement can go a long way. Even without a firm plan, collecting data will yield a positive result – although you’re better off with a plan if you want to get better ROI on that data. But the fact of the matter is, even some very simple project performance baselining will help you start to predict how similar projects may perform in the future – which is exactly how the early chess playing computer designs started.