The paradox of risk management; a project management practice perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the interplay between risk management and uncertainty and the contextual variability of risk management practice. More precisely, the research empirically measures the relation between the extent of use of risk management and the level of project uncertainty. Design/methodology/approach The research defines risk management from an empirical perspective., i.e. from an empirically‐identified set of tools that is actually used to perform risk management. This toolset is derived from the results of an ongoing major worldwide survey on what experienced practitioners actually do to manage their projects. This paper directly relates uncertainty to the degree of project definition. It uses a sample of 1,296 responses for which the interplay between risk management and uncertainty could be measured. Findings The results are very coherent. They verify and empirically validate many of the propositions drawn from a review of the literature. But results challenge some of the propositions found in the conventional project management literature and some commonly held views. The research shows that the use of risk management practices and tools is negatively related to the degree of project uncertainty. This somewhat counter‐intuitive result is consistent with a general tendency for all project management tools and techniques to be used more intensively in better defined contexts. Practical implications The empirical investigation of actual risk practices and their contextual variability can help better understand risk management practice and manage risks better. The research also clarifies the concepts of uncertainty, risk and risk management. Originality/value The results confirm some well‐known assumptions about practices, but at the same time produced unexpected results that can stimulate the development of new practices adapted to highly uncertain contexts. The project management field needs to develop new responses for specific contexts for which it was not primarily developed. The results of this research point in the direction of such a need for ill‐defined projects and highly uncertain contexts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.045 | 0.090 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".