Question

What is the zone of uncertainty, and how does it affect project and portfolio management? In what ways can project and portfolio managers mitigate the risk implied in the zone of uncertainty? If possible, illustrate your explanation using a specific business scenario.

Answer 1

The zone or uncertainity refers to the gaps that exist between the fields within the status of the interpreters' knowledge and social space. This refers to the lack of expertise, knowledge, estimation or accuracy about any product, event or process that would eventually lead to losses and risks in the organisation to impact the operations.

This zone of uncertainity affects the project management as you'll face the lack of knowledge or information between the important processes. Not having the adequate knowledge or information to carry out the essential tasks would lead to operational failure, increase in risks, failure costs, damage of the processes and goods and finally loss of quality and sustainability in the business, affecting the activities in an adverse manner.

To mitigate the same risk that prevails in the zone of uncertainity, following actions could be taken.

1. For example in the production and manufacturing industry or function in the company, the same level of uncertainity could be reduced by maintaining the interaction and involvement level of the employees. It is very important to include the employees and all other stakeholders to gather all kind of data and information which would give us a certain factor to predict the events of the future for the project management.  This also helps in empowerment for the employees.

2. The manufacturing industry or function of the company could use the technology and integration level to associate and link itself with other functions of the organisation. This helps in achieving a more accurate and detailed information regarding what estimation is of the supply, what estimation is of demand, what researchers have predicted the demand analysis for this year would be etc. Thus, maintaining a communication level to ensure the integration is maintained and sustained also helps in reducing the uncertainity zone in the project management.

3. At last, the company should have the right objectives and control analysis to give a proper direction and estimation of work in the organisation. The standards and objectives help in providing the right direction which would eventually reduces the uncertainity factor. And by checking if the standards are being met or not using the control analysis, you could always make sure the quality is maintained in between the processes.