نادیده انگاری عمدی در مورد مدیریت ریسک پروژه

The management of project risk is considered a key discipline by most organisations involved in projects. Best practice project risk management processes are claimed to be self-evidently correct. However, project risk management involves a choice between which information is utilized and which is deemed to be irrelevant and hence excluded. Little research has been carried out to ascertain the manifestation of barriers to optimal project risk management such as ‘irrelevance’; the deliberate inattention of risk actors to risk. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study of IT project managers, investigating their reasons for deeming certain known risks to be irrelevant. The results both confirm and expand on Smithson’s [Smithson, M., 1989. Ignorance and Uncertainty. Springer-Verlag, New York] taxonomy of ignorance and uncertainty and in particular offer further context related insights into the phenomenon of ‘irrelevance’ in project risk management. We suggest that coping with ‘irrelevance’ requires defence mechanisms, the effective management of relevance as well as the setting of, and sticking to priorities.

Institutions such as the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the Association of Project Management (APM) promote ‘best’ practice project management standards. Project risk management, as one of the key disciplines of project management, is defined as the systematic process of identifying, analysing and responding to risk as project-related events, or managerial behaviour, that is not definitely known in advance, but that has potential for adverse consequences on a project objective (Project Management Institute, 2004). Project risk management claims to enable project managers to effectively manage risk-related information. Raz and Michael (2001) have investigated the extent to which project managers perceived project risk management as effective. Specifically, they looked at an extensive range of risk management techniques, rating each against a ‘project management performance’ index based on the responses to their survey. This was a rare occasion where the inputs, as opposed to the outputs, of the risk management process were examined. More problematically, the precise nature of the inputs does not seem to have been explored adequately in previous research. In order to address some of these shortcomings, this study investigates how ‘irrelevance’ (the deliberate ignorance of risk-related information) manifests itself in the context of project risk management and how it constrains the perceived effectiveness of project risk management. In doing so, we seek to add to the debate on the effectiveness of risk management processes by considering the influence of social and cognitive factors as intervening conditions in project risk management.

Project risk management with its assumptions of ‘hyper rationality’ excludes many aspects of managerial behaviour. Organisations such as the Project Management Institute or the Association of Project Management claim that through the identification, analysis and response to risk, project managers can achieve planned project outcomes. Little research has been undertaken to ascertain whether project managers involved in risk management activity perceive the self-evidently correct processes and procedures they implement to be effective. There seems to be far more literature offering prescriptions to project managers on how to manage risk in project rather than assess the relative effectiveness of those prescriptions. Neither the shortcomings of current project risk management processes nor options to change and/or expand those best practice standards to include behavioural aspects of irrelevance have received much attention in literature so far. As long as no evidence is produced, whether project risk management actually helps project managers from their point of view (‘doing things right’), the acceptance of best practice project risk management standards is at stake (‘doing the right things’). The findings of this study show that in some projects, project risk management is conditioned by deliberate ignorance of project managers. The factors of untopicality, undecidability and utility of risk-related information characterised by taboos and suspension of belief appear to demote risk management to an administrative exercise having no or only little impact on the project outcome. Indeed, if irrelevance remains unattended by project managers, project risk management might turn out to be not only ineffective but also counterproductive. The research undertaken involved projects specifically from the IT industry and, as such, the extent to which the findings are more generally applicable to, say, engineering, construction or change projects is open to question. The specific nature of the project (industrial sector, complexity, size, etc. (Crawford et al., 2005)) is less likely to be an issue. Rather, the generalisability would, in this case, be limited by the character of the social conditions found in different project types. We would argue that it is the social conditions (such as organizational and, maybe, national culture) that would govern the response of project actors to the way they regard the relevance of project risk information. The question then becomes one of whether projects from, for example, different industries, or projects of differing complexities, have different cultures. Future research could examine this question as well as seek to validate the categories of irrelevance across a wider sample of projects.