A method to support risk management and resource allocation in projects based on risk acceptance strategy

Introduction: The main theme of this study is project risk management and it is focused on finding the best solution to accept the risks without deviation from the objectives and uses the opportunities of the uncertainty and risks. To fill the gaps of existing methods in accepting the opportunities that are associated with some risks, a new method has been designed to identify the best alternative way to accept a risk and the best amount and type of resources to allocate this alternative. To assess the risk-taking capability of each alternative, its Stress and Strain in a different situation would be calculated and a Strain-Stress system will be the main result of this analysis. Therefore, opportunities and risks should be evaluated together. Objectives: The three main objectives are 1) Design a method for evaluating (or measuring) the 'risk-taking capability' of an Organization. 2) Design a method to support decision-making to help the sustainability strategies of a company and simultaneously accept the risks of changes and improvements. 3) Identify the most efficient resource and the amount of resource consumption to make the project ready to accept risk. Method: To assess the risk-taking capabilities three new concepts are introduced include Risky-Opportunities, Stress, and Strain. Stress and Stain are two original concepts that will be used as indexes to support risk acceptance evaluation and resource allocation. To calculate the values of these new indexes, a multi-criteria method is considered, specifically, the Analytic Network Process (ANP) because ANP models take into explicit consideration mutual influences between elements and feedback effects. According to the ANP procedure, the pair-wise comparison matrix will define the priorities of each element in the clusters. Then for each alternative way of accepting the risks, the stress-strain system will be used to assess the risk-taking capability for each risky opportunity. Results: The results of this method provide a structured data that practically project managers could use as an index for evaluating (or measuring) the 'risk-taking capability' of an Organization or project; Also, this method is a tool to support sustainability strategies and, at the same time, accept the risks of changes and continuous improvements.