Customer Reviews

Appraisal, Risk and Uncertainty

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As someone who is doing my research in Project Risk Management I should say that not so many books are published on Project Risk with an academic perspective. In you search for your books in risk management you may find dozens of them in the market but most of them have a professional view and what they discuss in them do not have much academic value.

The book "Appraisal, Risk and Uncertainty" edited by Nigel Smith is book which I have used in my own research as reference several times. It is comprised of 10 chapters which 7 chapters of it are from Nigel Smith himself. Chapter 4 is written by G. Wood and R. Ellis. Chapter 8 is by P. W. Hetland and Chapter 9 is from T.Merna. The first three chapters are devoted to the introduction to project risk, project life cycle and the appraisal phase of the project. Chapter three emphasises on the essence of risk management in the appraisal phase. Chapter four is about the existing approaches to risk management in civil engineering. Making a review of the different methodologies and tools including the existing commercial softwares. Chapter five introduces a good classification of project risk within two main group of global and elemental risk. Chapter six and seven are mainly introduces the formal risk management process known as RAMP. Chapter eight is from P. W. Hetland about uncertainty management. Personally I am very interested in this topic and found that Hetland introduces a new approach. Basically a social scientists approach rather than the usual engineering approach. But unfortunately this chapter lacks an organization and the reader finishes the chapter while being confused about many of the issues discussed there. Even the chapter do not make a conclusion in relation to the issues been discussed in it. Chapter nine by T.Merna takes a strategic approach to management of risk in the corporation and analyses the risk in corporate business unit in accordance to corporate aim and objectives. Chapter ten is a summary of the developments in risk management. I would recommend to anyone in academia doing research in project risk management to read this book. There are many thoughts presented there which further work on them can be better quality academic outputs. But for a professional it can be a bit confusing. However in a subject like Project Risk Management which there are not much publications the enthusiastic readers should never miss any resources which would sparkle further thoughts and ideas.