Clouds of Vagueness
risk analysis
More for your money
I promised to review the Infrastructure Risk Group report on Managing Cost Risk & Uncertainty In Infrastructure Projects, a report which was launched last month at the ICE with the sponsorship of the IRM. The report is a result of work undertaken as part of the Infrastructure UK investigation of the high cost of infrastructure projects. […]
What you’ve been waiting for
Matthew Leitch asked me to summarise my last two posts about risk definitions. I said it would take 5 minutes, but as I scoped it out I realised that a lot was involved to provide a proper explanation. Eventually I developed Prezi presentation with a voiceover to cover the explanations. It’s very boring so I’m […]
Pedant’s Corner (2)
This is the second post on risk definitions in the context of risk management standards. Here we are moving on to risk governance, the outer level of the three risk management processes I proposed some time ago. In that previous work I suggested there should be three main components of a risk policy, the document […]
Pedant’s Corner (1)
In principle I’m a great fan of standards for risk management. Given the problems we have, there is a very attractive idea that conceptually lucid, clearly written standards can help us find the way forward. In reality the large range of standards (ISO 31000, BS 31100, superseded A/NZ documents, etc) and quasi standards (PRAM, MoR/P3M3, […]
It’s a risky world, just ask anyone
Last week the Institute of Risk Management North West regional group held a meeting on Adapting to the Global Risk Landscape. The intention was to talk about some of the most serious long term risks and what we should be doing about them. There’s a write up of the meeting appearing shortly on the IRM website, but […]
Fragility management
I reviewed Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Antifragility with the promise to look separately at what the lessons might be for organisational risk management. The answer is quite a bit, and this article will just be an initial high level view. The thinking is developed pretty uncritically from the book. There will be plenty of scope […]
Antifragility
Antifragility is the topic of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s last book in his trilogy on our uncertain world and how to deal with it. The other two were Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. These are both relatively narrow in their scope – though well worth their own reviews at some point – whilst Antifragility gives […]
Fools and liars
My ears are burning (metaphorically). I’ve just read Bent Flyvbjerg’s paper on quality control and due diligence in project management. His theme is the inaccuracy in forecast project costs and benefits. Specifically, the tendency to underestimate costs and overestimate benefits is attributed to the ‘planning fallacy’, a creation of our old friends Tversky, Kahneman and co. The source of […]
#PMChat
I’m looking forward right now to an interesting experience: getting interviewed on the radio. I’ve been asked to talk about my book Estimating Risk. The interviewers are from a US-based internet radio channel, PMChat, who do an interview once a week on Fridays and follow it up with a Twitter chat between their followers. Apart […]
Risk registers, bloody risk registers
It all sounds so simple. Just make a list of all the risks. Then you can start figuring out how to prioritise them and manage them in a comprehensive and visible way. Job done. This was how it seemed back in the early 90s when we took some tools that had proven quite effective for the management of […]
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