SAMPLE CHAPTER
Proactive Risk Management:
Controlling Uncertainty in Product
Development
by Preston G.
Smith and Guy Merritt
Chapter One:
What is Risk and How is it Managed?
To start with a clean slate, we
considered writing this book about ksir (risk spelled backwards)
rather than risk. Risk is a tainted term. Each of us has
prior, often subconscious and unhelpful, associations with risk.
Perhaps it recalls the life-insurance salesperson who called during
dinner last evening or the high blood pressure reading the doctor
took last year. Maybe it stems from a downturn in the economy and
its implications for your job. If you are an engineer, risk may
recall for you a design professor showing a film of the Tacoma
Narrows Bridge’s collapse.
Narrowing our focus to risk management does not help much.
An Internet search on "risk management" (in quotation marks) yields
over a million hits, very few of which have any connection with what
this book covers.
Consequently, we substitute surprises for risks for
a moment. This is a book about managing surprises in a project
environment. Rather than just letting the surprises happen to you,
we will show you how to identify them beforehand, assess their
consequences early on, and plan ways to render them harmless to the
objectives of your project. Although our main application is
projects to develop new products, the techniques apply equally well
to other types of projects that you may encounter in industry.
At this point, if you are an engineer, you may be thinking of
surprise in terms of your design that fails in a field trial. If
you are a marketer, surprise may relate to that start-up competitor
that you told the boss last month was no problem. If you are an
accountant, you are probably seeing surprises preceded by dollar,
euro, or yen signs. You are all correct. To further clarify, we
provide an example to illustrate the scope of project "surprise"
management.
Continue reading Proactive Risk Management: Chapter One
Inside Chapter One:
By
following the link above, you'll be taken to the rest of the sample
chapter, which contains the following components:
Example of project risks
Risk management and product development
What is a risk?
Why companies fail in managing risk
The antithesis of risk management: Fire Fighting
How much risk management?
Risk as an ally
Attitudes towards risk
Summary
Supplementary reading
Supporting Organization:
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Conference participants receive:
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Risk Management: Controlling Uncertainty in Product Development,
the new book by Preston Smith and Guy Merritt!
[Sample Chapter]
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