Managing the Unknown: A New Approach to Managing High Uncertainty and Risk in Projects

This book covers project risk management (PRM) differently than any other book available. The authors' present a new way of looking at the problem of managing projects in unusual and unknown environments: rather than working harder, straining to consider more possibilities in planning and formal risk management, they stress that a project manager must recognize that a project's unusual circumstances or complexity make planning approaches insufficient. In such cases, project managers must make use of two fundamentally different approaches: learning, or a flexible adjustment of the project approach as one learns more about the project, its environment and their interactions (as opposed to a contingent approach that utilizes planned ‘trigger points'), and selectionism, or pursuing multiple approaches independently of one another and then picking the best one.