Systemic project risk management - the way ahead

Project Risk Management (PRM) has become recognised as an important part of project planning and management. This paper briefly outlines the current state of PRM in design and development projects The development of PRM tools based upon project decompositions has brought significant benefits. For modern highly complex projects, however, this has proved to have significant flaws, particularly centring around the systemicity within the risk structures. This paper therefore outlines the next major step forward as project risk analysts move from "discrete PRM" to "systemic PRM". This has required the development of new techniques to elicit, represent, model and manage these risks. Further steps in this development to increase the impact of PRM on projects are also described, such as requisite modelling of management decision-making, efficient simulation techniques, and linking the modelling and tactical management decision-making.