ABSTRACT
Effective risk management starts with the recognition at senior management level that risk is an inherent feature of innovative projects and to avoid failures and disappointment some measure of risk management is necessary. How individuals choose to manage the risks that present themselves will be influenced by their own attitudes to risk and the attitudes adopted by the company. Considerable efforts have been made by individual workers, the professional associations and the standards bodies to devise a general process for the management of risks in projects. Although some of the risks of technical failure are reduced and even eliminated by the two-stage approach to development and testing, the project programme can be made more robust by a recognition of specific technical risks and inserting into the plan responses to each risk at the appropriate point. The Definitive Scenario software package uses the influence diagram for problem formulation; it can perform Monte Carlo simulations and is capable of 'dynamic risk analysis'.
