A. Gonen *Faculty of Management of Technology, HIT - Holon Institute of Technology, Holon, Israel*

### **9. References**

	- [3] Engert P.A., Lansdowne Z. F. 1999. Risk Matrix User's Guide, Version 2.2, MITRE Bedford, Massachusetts.

**Chapter 4**

© 2012 Cagliano et al., licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2012 Cagliano et al., licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The management of risk is currently one of the main topics of interest for researchers and practitioners working in the field of project management. Different perceptions, attitudes, values regarding risk, needs, project sectors, specifications, geographical, social, economic,

**A Framework to Select Techniques**

**Supporting Project Risk Management**

Sabrina Grimaldi, Carlo Rafele and Anna Corinna Cagliano

Projects may be conceived as temporary endeavors with a finite completion date aimed at generating unique products or services [1]. Today's marketplace characterised by fierce competition requires increased accuracy and reduced time and costs in running projects [2]. In such a context, the variability of actual quality, time, and cost performance compared to the expected one crucially impacts on the success of a project and makes risk a central issue in project management [3]. It has been demonstrated that failure to deal with risk is a main cause of budget exceeding, falling behind schedule, and missing performance targets [4,5]. Additionally, in several industries, such as the construction and information and communication technology ones, the growing level of complexity, due to increased size and scope, huger investments, longer execution processes, more required resources, an augmented number of stakeholders, instable economic and political environments, and changing regulations, exacerbates the degree of risk in projects [6]. Therefore, these aspects ask for assessing and controlling risk throughout all the phases of a project. Before going into detail about project risk management, it is beneficial to recall the notions of uncertainty and risk. Uncertainty arises from either the natural variability or randomness of a system or an incomplete information or knowledge of some of its characteristics. In the first instance, uncertainty cannot be reduced by increasing data collection or knowledge, though they are valuable for assessing it, while in the second case a more accurate data collection and understanding are able to decrease the level of uncertainty [7-9]. Project risk is defined as an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has either a positive or a negative effect on

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/50991

**1. Introduction**

project objectives [1,10].