A side benefit of teaching a Master level course in Project Risk Management is to hear how different companies practice risk management. In general the practice does not match the PmBOK guidelines or companies are not satisfied with their methodology.

This brings up the question of why? There are two recent failures which have consumed many hours of TV news time, the financial meltdown and the BP Gulf Blowout. Before the financial crisis and the BP blowout occurred, during the planning of these activities could the failures been identified and mediated or does this represent a failure of risk management or management? Should other views of risk supplement the PMBOK method? Does the PmBOK guidelines help a project manager to answer the questions: is my project’s risk management working, how do I know, and can the project manager improve the risk process?

Dr. Patton is a retired reliability engineer, an adjunct associate professor and a part time artist in Visual Mathematics. He spent twenty-six years with IBM in Test Engineering, Reliability Engineering and Technical Management. After retiring from IBM, he work eight years for TRW as a Senior Reliability Engineer. While working as an engineer, Dr. Patton was an adjunct instructor with many of the Universities providing education in the Rochester area (University of MN, Winona State University, University of St. Thomas, Cardinal Stritch University, College of St Scholastica, IBM System Research Institute, and St. Mary’s University). He taught classes in statistics, discrete mathematics, operations management, project risk, project quality, project procurement and project cost management. The mix of work and education provided a rich blend of viewpoints for many current business and engineering problems.