Stephen Ward & Chris Chapman 
How to Manage Project Opportunity and Risk 
Why Uncertainty Management can be a Much Better Approach than Risk Management

Since I wrote the Foreword for the second edition of this book,
risk management processes have become much more widely used, but
controversy about what should be done and how best to do it has
grown. Managing risk is a risky business. Chapman and Ward provide
an in-depth explanation of why it is important to understand and
manage underlying uncertainty in all its forms, in order to realise
opportunities more fully and enhance corporate performance. They
show what best practice should look like. The implications go well
beyond the conventional wisdom of project risk management,
providing an enlightening new perspective.

–Professor Tony M. Ridley

Imperial College London, Past President, Institution of Civil
Engineers

Chris Chapman and Stephen Ward continue to educate the
profession with this masterful exposition of the differences
between, and the potentials for combinations of, risk, uncertainty
and opportunity. Particularly welcome is the way they integrate
this trio into the project lifecycle – the bedrock of project
management control and organization.

–Peter W.G. Morris

Head of School and Professor of Construction and Project Management
University College London

Chris Chapman and Stephen Ward’s books on Project Risk
Management have been an essential part of my repertoire for twenty
years, and they are top of my recommended reading for the courses I
do on that subject. In this book they have enhanced their previous
work to focus on uncertainty management and emphasise more strongly
opportunities for improving project performance, rather then just
identifying what can go wrong. A structured process is an essential
part of managing project uncertainty, and their process is one of
the most powerful. This book will be added to my repertoire.

–Rodney Turner

Professor of Project Management, SKEMA Business School Lille

A profoundly important book. With How to Manage Project
Opportunity and Risk, Chris Chapman and Stephen Ward take a
good thing and make it better. Members of the project management
profession have been influenced for years by their insights into
project risk management. With this latest instalment the authors
demonstrate that risk and uncertainty needn’t be dreaded; in
fact, the reverse side of the ‘risk coin’ has always
been opportunity. My sincere appreciation to Chapman and Ward for
turning this particular coin over and showing readers, academic and
practitioner alike, the opportunity embedded in managing
projects.

–Jeffrey K. Pinto

Andrew Morrow and Elizabeth Lee Black Chair in Management of
Technology Sam and Irene Black School of Business, Penn State
Erie

Table of Content

Foreword to this edition by Mike Nichols ix

Foreword to the second edition with an update by Tony Ridley
xi

Foreword to the fi rst edition by Peter Wakeling xiii

Preface and overview by the authors xv

Acknowledgements xxv

PART I Setting the scene 1

1 Uncertainty in and around projects 3

2 Uncertainty, risk and opportunity 43

3 Key motives for uncertainty management 73

4 An overview of generic process frameworks 101

PART II The generic process in one key lifecycle stage
131

5 Define the project 133

6 Focus the process 153

7 Identify all the relevant sources of uncertainty,
response options and conditions 171

8 Structure all uncertainty 215

9 Clarify ownership 235

10 Quantify some uncertainty 251

11 Evaluate all the relevant implications 289

PART III The generic process in all lifecycle stages
325

12 Fully integrating the strategy shaping stages 327

13 Fully integrating the strategy implementation stages 365

PART IV Key corporate implications 389

14 Developing PUMP capability as a project 391

15 Contracts and governance as frameworks for enlightened
relationship management 411

16 A corporate capability perspective 435

References 463

Glossary 473

Index 479

About the author

Stephen Ward is Professor of Management and Deputy Head in
the School of Management, University of Southampton. For more than
thirty years his teaching, research and consulting activities has
focussed on risk and uncertainty management. He was founding
Director of Southampton’s MSc Programme in Risk Management. Stephen
has served on the British Standards Institute Risk Management
Committee, and is a Fellow of the UK Institute of Risk Management.
Recent research funded by the UK Institution of Civil Engineers
addressed operational risk in major infrastructure projects and
businesses. Stephen has published widely, including authorship of
Risk Management Organisation and Context (Witherby, 2005), and
jointly with Chris, Managing Project Risk and Uncertainty: A
Constructively Simple Approach to Decision Making (Wiley, 2002) and
Project Risk Management: Processes, Techniques and Insights (Wiley,
1997 and 2003).

Chris Chapman is Emeritus Professor of Management Science
in the School of Management, University of Southampton. He is a
former Director of the School. He was the founding chair of the
Association for Project Management Specific Interest Group on
Project Risk Management. He is a Past President of the Operational
Research Society, and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of
Actuaries. For more than 35 years his research has focused on risk
and uncertainty management. Like Stephen, his research is grounded
on extensive experience. He has worked for a number of consulting
firms as an international consultant for many different industries.
Chris writes from a practical but conceptually rigorous
perspective. He has published extensively, including joint
authorship of Management for Engineers (Wiley, 1987), Risk Analysis
for Large Projects: Models, Methods and Cases (Wiley, 1987),
Managing Project Risk and Uncertainty: A Constructively Simple
Approach to Decision Making (Wiley, 2002) and Project Risk
Management: Processes, Techniques and Insights (Wiley, 1997 and
2003).