for Projects – Exploiting Positive Risk
Effective Opportunity Management for Projects – Exploiting Positive Risk by David Hilson
Released in 2004 , with references to texts from years earlier, but still blazingly topical, underused and under-studied : opportunity management as part of risk management. Benefits management for projects in this case …
Effective Opportunity Management advocates embedding opportunity management in existing risk management that focuses too much or only on threats. His argument for doing this is that they are two sides of the same coin called uncertainty. The fact that at present in a number of standards the uncertainty of the achievement of the goals may imply either a positive deviation or a negative deviation from their achievement, is underused and too little known in today’s companies.
Throughout reading, it is discovered that it can indeed be incorporated into a single management process, provided a number of minor extensions to existing threat management. This makes the book really to be not just regarded as a mere opportunity management process description: it is in fact a possible comprehensive risk management process description with some tips and tricks. This actually shows that the expansion of threat management with the management of opportunities entails virtually no additional work, but can potentially be very profitable in terms of ROI.
In order for it to succeed, the author sees four CSF (critical success factors) as follows:
- You need to know what you mean by the word “risk”.
- You have to know how to do it in practice.
- You need the right support: people, resources, methods.
- A person must know how he thinks and reacts in order to be able to adjust risk behavior.
One possible conclusion after reading is that it is always an advantage to engage in benefits management. People are often too focused on problems.
The fact that this work is written for projects does not detract from the fact that many ideas are valid in the management of processes.