Harvard Business Essentials Managing Projects Large and Small: The Fundamental Skills for Delivering on Budget and on Time

8

Managing Risk

Scanning the Hazy Horizon

Key Topics Covered in This Chapter

• Identifying and prioritizing risks to the project plan
• Avoiding and minimizing risks
• Contingency planning

EVERY PROJECT PLAN includes assumptions—about task performance by project team members, the time required to complete key tasks, the future availability of resources, the collaboration of allies, and so forth. Risks lurk in each of these assumptions.What if the techies in the R&D lab cannot produce a workable prototype?What if a key member of the project team is hospitalized for a month—or leaves the company? How would the project be affected if a supplier to whom you have outsourced an important task falls a month behind schedule? Managers deal with risks like ...