Risk and vulnerability management, project agility and resilience: a comparative analysis

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to present a critical analysis of the project management literature on four concepts; risk management, vulnerability management, project agility and project resilience. The goal is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of these concepts to deal with disruptive events through the development of a conceptual framework that captures their differences and convergences. Therefore, a review of recent literature from international journals, specialized mainly in project risk management, vulnerability management, project agility, and project resilience has been conducted. A systematic literature review is adopted to compare the four key concepts of this study and to draw conclusions. A case from the information technology field is used to better illustrate the comparison.Results from this study show that risk management and vulnerability management are proactive concepts focusing on the management of known events or actions. Alternatively, project agility is a reactive concept that aims to adapt to changes, but not necessarily disruptive events. Project resilience is a mix concept – proactive and reactive – focusing on recovering from known and unknown disruptive events. In addition, this comparative analysis and the conceptual framework developed can be used to exploit future areas of research and exhibit new opportunities where project management best practices can be improved to deal with disruptive events.

Hybrid project management – a systematic literature review

“…To search and analyze existing literature on hybrid project management, a systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted. Literature reviews are a central part of scientific work and SLR is an established method in the information systems and project management discipline (e.g., [36][37][38]). A SLR includes a systematic, explicit and reproducible review and analysis of all thematically relevant sources.…”

Preparedness for contingencies: a systematic review of the factors that influence the crisis resilience of project managers

“…In conclusion, from a project management perspective, focusing solely on agility could make a project vulnerable (Rahi, 2019;Rahi et al, 2021) because events outside the scope of customers' and stakeholders' expectations as well as market and technology demands can interrupt a project. Consequently, it would be intriguing to investigate new avenues that focus on coping with disruptive events and enhancing a project's capacity to manage occurrences that may cause it to deviate from its primary objectives.…”

“…Individuals must make important decisions about whether to resist, absorb, adapt, or recover quickly after a disaster. Individuals' preparedness and awareness (StaupeDelgado & Kruke, 2018;Sutton & Tierney, 2006), risk management (Imperiale & Vanclay, 2021), vulnerability knowledge (Füssel & Klein, 2006), as well as disaster management skills and leadership, all have an impact on how effectively they discover and recover from a disaster (Crosweller & Tschakert, 2021;Rahi et al, 2021). Understanding the evolution of multidimensional resilience research, from individual resilience to community resilience, is critical at both the individual and community levels (Kapogiannis et al, 2021;McLaren & Loosemore, 2019;Mokline & Ben Abdallah, 2021;Tasic et al, 2020;Thibodeaux, 2021).…”

“…The urgency of a paradigm shift from risk-based to resilience-based techniques has been heightened as a result. A resilience-based strategy focuses on enhancing project resilience as the capacity to withstand known and unknown uncertainty (Rahi, 2019;Rahi et al, 2019Rahi et al, , 2021. The reality is that project management during crisis events is complex and stressful (Ismail, Majid, Roosli, & Samah, 2014).…”

Validation of a New Project Resilience Scale in the IT Sector

“…As mentioned by Naderpajouh et al (2020), “at the project level, the core yet underdeveloped concept should be project resilience and resilience projects” (Naderpajouh et al, 2020, p. 5). Therefore, rigorous conceptualization is needed to properly define the concept of project resilience (Blay, 2017; Rahi et al, 2021).…”