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Source publication
Major investment projects are essential for companies and governments to develop new products and services to maintain the growth of the company or the viability of the government agency. Early in an investment’s life cycle, the identification and evaluation of risk is a critical project management task that will have a direct impact on the future...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... each cell in the risk matrix must be labeled as one of several risk categories, e.g., low, medium, and high. The risks with low likelihood and low consequences are low risk, the high likelihood and high consequences hazards are high risks, and the medium risks are in the middle of the matrix (See Figure 1). Risk usually decreases as you go down and to the left of the matrix. ...
Context 2
... United States Department of Defense has used the risk matrix in Figure 1 to examine the risk of major investment programs. Likelihood is categorized by five levels, from remote to near certainty. ...
Citations
This chapter addresses a new perspective towards leadership, that of balanced leadership in organizational project management. The chapter starts with an overview of existing theoretical perspectives of leadership and leaders, where we introduce the distinction between leadership intent as an intra-personal process and practiced leadership as an inter-personal process of influencing. We discuss some of the popular theories in light of this distinction. Then we address the need for balanced leadership, which we propose as the temporary adjustment of leadership exercised by the project manager (vertical leadership) with leadership by one or several team members (horizontal leadership), and the situational particularities that emphasize the appropriateness of one approach over the other. We subsequently develop a four-step process of selecting, enabling, exercising, and controlling for balanced leadership and outline the intra and inter-personal activities for vertical and horizontal leaders in each of these steps. This provides an in-depth overview of the type and scope of inter and intra-personal leadership activities and their synchronization needs for coordinated balanced leadership to happen. Readers learn to look at leadership in and across projects as a combination of horizontal and vertical approaches, distributed in a coordinated way between vertical and horizontal leaders in organizational project management.
The importance of the front-end decision-making phase in projects is being increasingly recognized—the need to “do the right project” is on a par with “doing the project right.” This area is underrepresented in the literature, but there are a number of key themes that run throughout, identifying key issues or difficulties during this stage. This article looks at some of these themes and includes: the need for alignment between organizational strategy and the project concept; dealing with complexity, in particular the systemicity and interrelatedness within project decisions; consideration of the ambiguity implicit in all major projects; taking into account psychological and political biases within estimation of benefits and costs; consideration of the social geography and politics within decision-making groups; and preparation for the turbulence within the project environment, including the maintenance of strategic alignment.
