I am the author of the forthcoming book Solving for Project Risk Management: Understanding the Critical Role of Uncertainty in Project Management, to be published by McGraw-Hill this November. Now available for pre-order – http://tiny.cc/j7xbpz. This book is written for a general project management audience. While much of my research has a mathematical focus, to make the book and its lessons broadly available, I make the points in the book with stories, graphs, and examples. If you are interested in the technical details of the information in the book, contact me. I would be glad to provide you with copies of my papers that provide this information.
My name is Christian B. Smart. This is my given, birth name. My educational training includes a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, and I have worked as a contractor and civil servant for NASA and the Department of Defense for 20 years. My focus has primarily been on forecasting costs for large programs, including launch vehicles, satellites, and missile defense programs. I have witnessed first-hand dumb decisions by senior leaders regarding program planning, many of which were related to financial risk management. In the process of getting my book published, I found that the lessons I had learned about defense and aerospace projects apply to all types of projects – roads, dams, bridges, information technology, etc. As a result, I wrote this book to apply to all projects.
Historically, most projects of all types have experienced frequent and significant cost and schedule growth. This problem has not gotten better over time. Some 70 to 80 percent of projects experience cost and/or schedule increases. For cost growth, the average growth is 50% or higher. One in six projects more than doubles in cost from the initial plans to completion, including projects that have been cancelled. This issue is even worse than it appears, as these statistics do not take into account project performance. To mitigate overruns, project often cut scope and sometimes take on technical risk, leading to an increased chance of failure. This historical evidence indicates that project risk management is broken and needs fixing.
The purpose of this blog is to discuss issues related to fixing financial risk management, along with other topics that interest me, including economics, machine learning, and data science. While there are some serious topics to discuss, I try to make my writing both educational
and fun.
On a personal note, “Christian B. Smart” once showed up on a list of funny names on an internet post, along with “Johnny Walker” and “Benjamin R. Goode.” My middle name is Boyd, and many of my school rolls only had room for 20 characters, including spaces and commas, so I often appeared as “Smart, Christian Boy.”