Abstract Risk management is deemed as a critical process toward achieving the objectives of any project. A number of tools and techniques have been developed to help project managers reduce the risk involved in complex projects as risk is generally perceived as a negative event. However, uncertainty, which may lead to risk events may well result in opportunities. With the main aim of managing both risk and opportunity within an interdependent setting of interacting project uncertainties, we present a new thinking, called ‘uncertainty thinking’, a process model, a Bayesian Belief Network and Influence Diagram based modeling approach to implement uncertainty thinking in practice. We demonstrate the implementation of the developed uncertainty modeling approach through an illustrative case. We introduce new loss and opportunity metrics to help project managers prioritize uncertain variables within a network setting taking into account interdependencies and develop an optimization scheme for selecting loss reduction and opportunity exploitation strategies in accordance with the decision maker’s loss averse/gain seeking preferences. The results reveal the importance of modeling both risk and opportunity in managing project uncertainties as focusing only on the negative connotation of risk may result in selecting sub-optimal decisions. Furthermore, we also establish that minimization of the expected loss across a risk network does not necessarily maximize the expected gain.

中文翻译：

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映射项目中风险和机会评估的不确定性

摘要 风险管理被视为实现任何项目目标的关键过程。已经开发了许多工具和技术来帮助项目经理降低复杂项目中涉及的风险，因为风险通常被视为负面事件。然而，可能导致风险事件的不确定性很可能会带来机会。主要目的是在相互依赖的项目不确定性的相互依存环境中管理风险和机会，我们提出了一种称为“不确定性思维”的新思维，一种过程模型，一种基于贝叶斯信念网络和影响图的建模方法，以在不确定性思维中实施实践。我们通过一个说明性案例展示了已开发的不确定性建模方法的实施。我们引入了新的损失和机会指标，以帮助项目经理在考虑相互依赖性的情况下优先考虑网络环境中的不确定变量，并根据决策者的损失厌恶/寻求收益的偏好制定优化方案，以选择减少损失和机会开发策略。结果揭示了对风险和机会进行建模在管理项目不确定性方面的重要性，因为只关注风险的负面含义可能会导致选择次优决策。此外，我们还确定，风险网络中预期损失的最小化并不一定会使预期收益最大化。