Project Risk Governance

In Project Risk Governance, Dieter Fink breaks new ground in two ways. Firstly, he places project risk management in the context of today’s organisations in which objectives are increasingly implemented through projects to better respond to fast-changing markets. Secondly, he applies a governance perspective to examine project risk at the project and corporate levels, an approach which is significantly under-researched and for which theoretical knowledge and professional practice are at an early stage of maturity. Project risk governance falls between corporate governance and project governance and is attracting increasing attention. The author argues that there are two reasons for this. The first is the ’projectisation’ of organisations, in particular within organisations conforming to the Project-Based Organisation (PBO) model. The second is the prevalence of a strategic approach to managing risk for the purposes of protecting organisational values and creating competitive advantage. The book addresses governance, strategy, value management and building enterprise-wide Project Risk Governance (PRG) capabilities. Chapters examine the role of projects in organisations and the need to integrate project and business strategy within the framework of the Project-Based Organisation. PRG is introduced via its links with corporate and project governance and its scope is covered in chapters that identify relevant processes, structures and relationship mechanisms. Contextual influences such as the professionalisation of project management are recognised and insights provided to increase readers’ understanding of uncertainty, risk events, and probabilities and of the essential requirements of managing risks at project level. The final chapter provides a roadmap to the stages and dimensions of a PRG maturity model.

Dieter Fink is an Associate Professor in the School of Management at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia. He previously worked as a Systems Engineer for IBM and as Manager, Information Technology Consulting, for Arthur Young (now Ernst & Young) for whom he carried out a number of project management assignments. He teaches at the master level in his university a course in project risk management. In 2011, the Australian Institute of Project Management provided him with research support to identify from its membership the key issues in project risk management for the next 3-5 years. Over the past twenty-five years he has authored a book on security management and published over 80 refereed research papers in a wide range of international journals and conferences proceedings.