Engineering Project Management

9Risk and Opportunity Management

Some things can (and probably will) go wrong on your project; how can you still get the job done? Every human endeavor entails uncertainty; things may not go as planned. In light of that uncertainty, how do you get the project done within the promised parameters, such as schedule, cost, technical capability, and so forth? In this chapter, I show you how to combine good engineering and good statistics in a manner that allows you to cope with these uncertainties.

9.1 Things Can Go Wrong With Our Project: How Do We Cope?

In any human endeavor, and most especially in a complex engineering project, things may go awry and not according to plan, and thereby cause problems. These problems might manifest themselves as problems in any of various ways: as problems in achieving the technical capabilities that we promised in the contract, as an increase in the predicted cost of completing the project, as a delay to the predicted completion date of the project, or as any of a variety of other problems, such as safety, reliability, our ability to staff the project with appropriate numbers and skills of personnel, and so forth; and of course, a problem might manifest itself as a combination of these symptoms.

Since our engineering projects are both important and expensive, we endeavor to think in advance of these problems arising about what might go wrong, and to take actions in advance that might lessen both the likelihood that such a problem will actually ...