Strategic Decisions for Project Leaders: Exploiting Risk and Opportunity

Project management executives and project owners can exploit risk to their advantage and find opportunities. Learn how to leverage the decision-making tools using Bayesian thinking, utility theory, and behavioral economics.

Enroll

What You Will Learn

  • Project decision making considering risk aversion and utility, calculating risk premiums using quantitative project risk models.
  • Risk transfer via insurance and re-insurance. What are insurance and re-insurance and why can project managers use insurance, bonds, and other financial instruments?
  • How to transfer risk and reduce transaction costs? How much should the PM pay to transfer risk?
  • What is Alternative Risk Transfer (ART), including insurance-linked securities, risk pools, resilience bonds, and other instruments, and how can projects make use of them?
  • What are catastrophe (CAT) bonds? When and where are they most useful?

About This Course

Skip About this course
Once project risks are identified and quantitatively analyzed, the project manager needs to make decisions. Having created probabilistic models of project risks, powerful methods of decision science can be brought to bear in making optimal plans and creating contingencies.

While some strategies can be executed concurrently with proactive management, risk can also be transferred or eliminated using carefully-planned strategies. These methods open the possibility of smarter decisions with more risk-neutral tactics that take advantage of capital markets. Financial approaches to transferring risk by insurance, catastrophe bonding, and other mechanisms is a poorly understood but efficacious method for dealing with unique risks on large and potential consequential projects.

By leveraging the appropriate tools for estimation using Bayesian thinking, classical utility theory, and behavioral economics, the project management executive or project owner can exploit risk to their advantage. The opportunities for construction firms, facility managers, municipal governments, and investors is enormous and growing.

At A Glance

Your Instructor

Gregory Baecher

Professor Baecher is an experienced risk and reliability engineer with years of experience in the civil engineering and infrastructure industry. It is important to him that students develop an understanding of risk management on large and small projects and within programs.

Syllabus

Week 1
Decision Making
Week 2
Risk Aversion and utility theory
Week 3
Risk Transfer via Insurance
Week 4
Re-Insurance industry
Week 5
Cat Bonds and alternative risk transfer

More edX Professional Certificate Programs

Lean Product Portfolio Management

Drive your career forward.

Environmental Project Management: Co-Creating Sustainable Solutions

Creating Sustainable Solutions to Complex Environmental and Societal Threats

Project Management Professional (PMP) Exam Prep Training – Crystalizing Methods, Terminology and Techniques.

Pass the PMP Exam on the first try by Crystalizing the methods.

Product Visioning and Strategy: Preparing for Agile Execution

Generate big ideas and a culture of innovation

Digital Transformation Playbook for Government

Learn how to apply the foundational knowledge of Digital Strategy and Execution to the Government sector.

Platform Product Management: Enabling the Low Code/No Code (LC/NC) Business Revolution

Learn how to lead system Integration of Low-Code, No-Code (LCNC) platforms across the entire Product-Platform Lifecycle.

Designing and Delivering the Citizen Developer Training Program

Ensure you have the right training program to make your citizen developers highly productive and effective.

Program Management: Enabling Value Driven Change

Learn how to manage and lead change with programs

Construction Management

Learn how to manage and deliver successful construction projects.

Re-Imagining Leadership

Build the power skills that foster a positive workplace.

Program Management and the Art of Communication

Master the communication skills you need to succeed.

Product Management

Lead the product life cycle from discovery to delivery.

Agile Project Management

Deliver innovative solutions by unleashing your team's potential.

Transforming Your Company’s Data Analytics: Championing the Digital Enterprise

Drive your career forward.