Chapter 14
Understanding Project Management Risks
Projects and project management processes represent a special way of organizing, administering and controlling selected enterprise activities. Although often a misused term, project management is the process or discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of some special activity, such as closing down a business operation or implementing a new information technology (IT) application. A project also is a temporary endeavor with a defined beginning and end based on established dates or other deliverable requirements. Projects are undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, and they typically have defined objectives to bring about some beneficial change or added value.
The temporary nature of projects stands in contrast to more common business-as-usual operations, which are based on repetitive, permanent or semipermanent functional work activities to produce products or services. Project activities usually do not appear on regular enterprise organization charts due to their temporary nature with staff members who often have other responsibilities in enterprise operations.
Projects and project-based activities represent variations from classic organization structures and present some additional needs and concerns in an enterprise's enterprise risk management (ERM) plans and activities. Projects are usually short-term efforts to implement some objective where people or resources ...
