Project resilience is poorly understood but much needed. Best practice project execution planning (PEP) including scheduling, budgeting, and risk management can only take the project management team so far. To put it bluntly, stuff happens. PEP relies upon important assumptions about the future that may or may not materialise. Against the baseline of PEP, project resilience addresses the inherent uncertainty at the heart of project execution in terms of both the emergent uncertainties around the internally generated interactions between the various elements within the project and the external shocks that undermine PEP assumptions. These often manifest initially in weak, ambiguous signals that need to be read carefully in order to respond appropriately.

Project resilience is therefore about the capabilities of the project team to sense change in PEP assumptions that has both cognitive and stakeholder engagement dimensions; about the speed and direction of the communications within the team and with stakeholders; and about the slack resource required to craft responses as possible threats become real challenges. Project resilience is therefore about both the competencies of the members of the project team and the design of the project organisation to be mindful, responsive, and creative as they manage project execution. The concepts in this book are important and they have influenced our own executive education on leading complex engineering projects. I commend it to you.

Graham Winch

Professor of Project Management, and
Academic Director for Executive Education at
Alliance Manchester Business School,
University of Manchester