ADVANCES IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT :

That Uncertain Feeling!

By David Cleden
UK

From the editor:  Managing Project Uncertainty

Risk management is primarily concerned with what we can anticipate or see. It offers mechanisms and approaches for addressing chunks of the future that we can conceive. Increasingly however, more organizations allocate additional contingency resources for other things that we do not know about. While risks can be viewed as the known unknowns, uncertainty is concerned with the unknown unknowns that are not susceptible to analysis and assessment. It is these unknown unknowns that challenge project managers and require new skills and understanding. This is where the handling and managing of project uncertainty become a key skill.

Decision makers (including project managers) are not comfortable in the presence of uncertainty. The impact of uncertainty often defers decisions and delays actions as managers attempt to figure out their options. Indeed, the presence of uncertainty has been shown by psychologists to reduce the effectiveness of decision makers in different areas.

This article by David Cleden explores some of the implications of uncertainty offering tools and approaches for making sense of and responding to uncertainty. It is derived from his recent book which is part of the Advances in Project Management Series published by Gower.

Managing Project Uncertainty by David Cleden, Gower 2009, ISBN: 978-0-566-08840-7

Darren Dalcher, PhD, Series Editor

That Uncertain Feeling
By David Cleden

Here’s a fundamental truth that all project managers would do well to heed:  all risks arise from uncertainty, but not all uncertainty can be captured as risks.  This means that over-reliance on risk management can leave a project exposed to unexpected ‘bolts from the blue’ forcing the PM to be reactive not proactive.

No forecast of future events can ever be perfect.  Consequently risk management can only take us so far –- we also need a strategy for managing uncertainty.  Of course, dealing with uncertainty is fundamentally hard because we are trying to grapple with what we don’t know.  So to stand a chance of keeping uncertainty within manageable limits we need to understand its characteristics and learn to recognize its warning signs.  Here are five guidelines which will help.

1.  Aim to contain uncertainty, not eliminate it.  You can’t bring order to the universe and neither can you protect your project from every conceivable threat.  Managers who try, labour under unworkable risk management regimes, constructing incomprehensible risk logs and impossibly costly mitigation plans.  Amidst all the effort being poured into managing small, hypothetical risks, a project manager may be too busy to notice that the nuts and bolts of the project -- where the real focus of attention should be -- has stalled.  Concentrate instead on detecting and reacting swiftly to early signs of problems.  Whilst uncertainty can never be entirely eliminated, it can be contained, and that should be good enough.  Ultimately, this is a far more effective use of resources.

Visualize a project as existing in a continual state of dynamic tension.  (See Figure 1).  The forces of uncertainty continually try to push the project off its planned path.  If left unchecked, the problems may grow so severe that there is no possibility of recovering back to the original plan.

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About the Author Dr. David Cleden Author David Cleden is a senior project manager with nearly twenty years experience of commercial bid management and project delivery, mainly within the public sector.  With a successful track record in delivering large and technically challenging IT projects, he also writes widely on the challenges faced by modern businesses striving for efficiency through better management processes.  He is the author of Managing Project Uncertainty published by Gower Publishing, part of the Advances in Project Management series edited by Professor Darren Dalcher.  David can be contacted at david.cleden@btinternet.com.