Fanatic Risk Acceptance: A Tragic Tale One Century Later

I found it very ironic that last week I was co-facilitating a session on Risk Management as part of the Project Management Institute Upstate New York Chapter’s PMP Exam Prep class. As defined in the Project Management Institute’s Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) one of the inputs to the Plan Risk Management process is Enterprise Environmental Factors.  The PMBOK defines this input as:

“The enterprise environmental factors that can influence the Plan Risk Management process include, but are not limited to, risk attitudes and tolerances that describe the degree of risk that an organization will withstand.”

As part of the exam prep session we review the need to understand which project constraints (time, cost, scope, or quality) organizations and sponsors are most sensitive, to be used as an input in the process of ranking project risks. For example if you are working on a project which your organization’s CEO or state’s Governor has publically announce a date for deployment, your project will be more sensitive to risks that would impact the schedule.