Choosing project risk management techniques. A theoretical framework

TLDR

Project risk management is increasingly critical for achieving higher quality while cutting time and costs, yet existing models and techniques lack clear guidance on when and how to apply them, especially amid fragmented decision‑making and limited knowledge sharing. The authors propose a theoretical framework that offers guidelines for selecting risk‑management techniques based on key managerial and operational characteristics of a project. They derive a taxonomy from a literature review, defining three dimensions—risk‑management process phase, project life‑cycle phase, and corporate risk maturity—and apply it to classify a broad set of risk techniques. The framework facilitates the integration of risk‑management and knowledge‑management processes.

Abstract

The pressure for increasing quality while reducing time and costs places particular emphasis on managing risk in projects. To this end, several models and techniques have been developed in literature and applied in practice, so that there is a strong need for clarifying when and how each of them should be used. At the same time, knowledge about risk management is becoming a matter of paramount importance to effectively deal with the complexity of projects. However, communication and knowledge creation are not easy tasks, especially when dealing with uncertainty, because decision-making is often fragmented and a comprehensive perspective on the goals, opportunities and threats of a project is missing. With the purpose of providing guidelines for the selection of risk techniques taking into account the most relevant aspects characterising the managerial and operational scenario of a project, a theoretical framework to classify these techniques is proposed. Based on a literature review of the criteria to categorise risk techniques, three dimensions are defined: the phase of the risk management process, the phase of the project life cycle and the corporate maturity towards risk. The taxonomy is then applied to a wide selection of risk techniques according to their documented applications. This work helps to integrate the risk management and the knowledge management processes. Future research efforts will be directed towards refining the framework and testing it in multiple industries.