Solving for Project Risk Management

I am excited to announce that McGraw-Hill will be publishing my book on project risk management. The book will be published in November and is available for pre-order from Amazon – http://tiny.cc/j7xbpz

My last book-length writing project was my Ph.D. dissertation. Back then, an ice storm caused me to be stuck inside for a few days, which helped me meet a tight deadline to be able to graduate. This time, COVID-19 caused me to be stuck inside, aiding me in meeting another deadline. I’ve been working on this project on and off for the last six years. I submitted the manuscript today, and picked out cover art for the book with my editor today. The cover art is shown below.

I had initially written this with a focus on defense and aerospace, but McGraw-Hill convinced me to broaden the scope to project management in general. After a little research, I discovered that all projects have the risk management shortcomings I had discovered for the defense and aerospace industries, so it took only a little work to frame my findings in this wider context.

The book motivates the need for better risk management by discussing the enduring problems of high cost growth and long schedule delays. This motivates the need for quantitative risk analysis of both cost and schedule. Even when quantitative risk analysis is performed, it suffers from serious issues:

• Risk is underestimated
• Portfolio analysis is rarely done
• Conventional S-curves provide no information about the tails of risk distributions
• Simply adding money and time will only result in more expensive projects that take longer to complete

My book explores provides fixes for these issues as well. It is written for a general project management audience. The book has no equations. All the ideas are explained with tables and graphs.