Threats and Opportunities: Risk Is Not Always Negative
Ask any project manager whether risk includes opportunity and the right answer comes back immediately. Then open the risk register. Every line describes something that could go wrong, the impact column only counts downwards, and the escalation route exists to report trouble. The concept is understood perfectly well, and the machinery built around it was designed for loss.
Handling positive risk turns out to be less a matter of conviction than of plumbing. The teams that do it well are not more optimistic than anyone else. They have made a handful of small changes to how uncertainty gets recorded, reviewed and owned, and the changes are cheap.
Telling an opportunity from good news
Two tests do most of the work. The first is whether the thing is genuinely uncertain. A supplier who has already agreed to release capacity early is good news, and it belongs in the plan. A supplier who might release capacity early if asked at the right moment is an opportunity, because the outcome is still open and something you do changes the odds.
The second test is whether anybody could act on it. An opportunity nobody can act on is a hope, and hopes clutter a register without improving anything. The key concepts at Section 2.7.1 of the PMBOK® Guide take in uncertainty that could help a project as well as uncertainty that could harm it, and the practical consequence of housing both in one domain is that both earn the same treatment: identified, sized, owned, and either acted on or explicitly left alone.
The two tests also keep the register honest. Most of what gets logged as an opportunity in practice is either a benefit already committed in the business case or a wish that the weather holds. Neither survives the questions.
Why the machinery misses them
Thresholds are the first obstacle. Risk thresholds are almost always written as levels of harm that trigger attention, so an uncertainty carrying a possible upside of two hundred thousand pounds registers as nothing at all while a possible overspend of fifty thousand triggers a review. Nothing about that is wrong. It simply has no channel running in the other direction.
Reporting language is the second. The standing question at most reviews is some version of what has gone wrong and what is being done about it. A project manager who answers with an opportunity is changing the subject, and in a tense programme that reads as deflection. Where the agenda has no slot for the item, it does not get raised a second time.
Ownership is the third and the most damaging, because capturing an opportunity usually needs somebody outside the project to act. Taking up a supplier's spare capacity means a commercial decision. Using an earlier-than-expected regulatory approval means someone releasing money ahead of plan. A project manager can identify the opportunity and cannot bank it, so unless it is escalated with the seriousness a threat would get, it expires quietly.
A retail bank was nine months into consolidating three customer contact platforms. Partway through, the vendor of the platform being migrated away from offered to extend support at the existing rate for a further eighteen months, because they wanted the reference. The migration was running late, and the extension would have removed the cliff edge that was driving an expensive parallel-running plan. The offer reached the programme board under supplier news, was noted, and lapsed eleven weeks later. Nobody did anything wrong. The offer had no owner, no value attached to it and no date in anybody's diary, so it was never weighed against the parallel-running cost it could have avoided.
Responses that actually get taken
Responses to an opportunity come in the same shapes as responses to a threat, turned the other way up. You can make the good outcome more likely by doing the thing that shifts the odds, which might be asking the supplier now, or running the pilot early enough that approval lands inside the funding window. You can make it bigger if it arrives, which usually means arranging somewhere to put freed-up money or people before they are freed up. You can bring in somebody better placed to capture it, which is what a gain-share clause is for. You can also decide it is not worth pursuing and record that decision, which is legitimate and rare.
Whether any of them happens comes down to two things a threat response gets automatically. The first is a named owner with the authority to act, which for most opportunities means somebody senior to the project manager. The second is a date, because opportunities expire: the capacity gets sold, the window closes, the favourable rate moves. An opportunity sitting in a register with no owner and no expiry date is a note to self.
Reading the bank's supplier offer as an opportunity with a deadline attached, and not as a piece of correspondence, is the sort of recognition a structured PMP exam preparation course builds by putting the same situation in front of a candidate in a dozen different costumes.
For a PMP® candidate, a favourable development deserves exactly the treatment a problem gets. The question in both cases is what happens next and on whose authority, and stopping at a note of the good news leaves the work half done.
Put a standing question on the agenda of the risk review, and the change costs nothing. What has become more possible since we last met, and who would have to move for us to get it? Asked out loud once a month, it turns up two or three items a year that would otherwise have gone past unremarked. Attach an owner and an expiry date to each one and most of the problem is solved, without anybody having to become more cheerful about the project.
Interested in going further?
Spotting an opportunity while it is still live, and knowing who has to move for it to be captured, is a judgement that gets little practice because the situations are uncommon on any one project. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation runs threats and opportunities through the same reasoning, which is where the asymmetry in most organisations becomes obvious.
Readers who want the whole Risk Performance Domain, and not only its opening concepts, will find it in the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
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References
A153: Risk vs Issue: The Difference That Changes What You Do Next
A159: Risk Appetite, Tolerance and Threshold: Stop Mixing Them Up
A166: Ambiguity, Complexity and Uncertainty Are Not the Same Thing
A152: The PMBOK 8 Risk Performance Domain: What It Really Covers
A154: When Does a Risk Become an Issue?
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