Managing risk in projects–fundamentals of project management, by D. Hillson

This book provides a good overall picture and a good high level treatment of project risk management. The author David Hillson is a risk management consultant who has worked in diverse functions of international project management associations. The book consists of seven chapters. The first chapter is devoted to a definition of project risk ‘‘as uncertainty that, if it occurs, will positively or negatively affect the achievements of the project’’. The second chapter elaborates why risk is an inevitable companion of a project and why risk management is indispensable for undertaking projects successfully. Chapter 3 is the core chapter of the book. It provides the project risk management process with the phases risk initiation, risk identification, risk assessment, risk response planning, risk response implementation, risk communication, and risk review. Chapter 4 addresses the peopleissue of risk, i.e. the risk attitude of decision makers, the influences on and the management of the latter. The next two chapters, Chapters 5 and 6, advocate that the risk management of a project should not be done separately from project management but in an integrated fashion throughout the life cycle of the project, i.e. it should be ‘‘built-in and not bolt-on’’ and it should be done on all hierarchical levels of the organisation. The last chapter addresses factors for a successful project risk management. Throughout the book the author does a good job in guiding the reader through the material by providing for each chapter a short introduction relating the subject of the chapter to the overall topic and a short summary providing the essentials of the chapter, respectively. The material is related to the definitions of the main practical project management organisations such as the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the Association for Project Management (APM). Here, the book benefits from the involvement of the author in these organisations. The intended audience of the book is clearly the practitioners who want to obtain an overview of project risk management. For them the book provides the material in a high level manner without going into the details of the different tools and techniques. The advantage of this approach is a light and readable book, the drawback is that the book requires knowledge in project management (e.g. work breakdown structure, project schedule, project objectives, project sponsor), quantitative management approaches (simulation, strength weaknesses, opportunities and threat analysis, Monte Carlo simulation, decision tree analysis, real options, Analytic Hierarchy Process) and statistics (probability distribution function, three point estimates, distribution function, correlation). The reader not familiar with these concepts has to stay with the overall picture or has to resort to further literature. In providing the necessary reference, the book is very sparse. This holds in particular for scientific publications. In many cases, e.g. for Monte Carlo