Programmatic Risk – Completing the Enterprise Picture

The types of risk addressed in Enterprise Risk Management generally include financial risks such as market and credit risk and event driven sources of financial loss such as accidents or natural phenomena events. This “operational” view of risk, however, omits what I believe is the larger threat to enterprise level success that stems from bad decision making relative to what the organization should be doing. Stated differently, I believe that poor programmatic or strategic decisions have both greater consequence and higher frequency than failures to execute operations adequately.

This presentation will present evidence to support this proposition and introduce the work done at the Los Alamos National Lab to adapt concepts and tools from the disciplines of systems analysis, probabilistic risk analysis, decision analysis, and other fields to the assessment of programmatic risks in large and complex research & development projects.