EdX

Strategic Decisions for Project Leaders: Exploiting Risk and Opportunity (edX)

Strategic Decisions for Project Leaders: Exploiting Risk and Opportunity (edX)

Project management executives and project owners can exploit risk to their advantage and find opportunities. Learn how to leverage the decision-making tools using Bayesian thinking, utility theory, and behavioral economics.

Class Deals by MOOC List - Click here and see EdX's Active Discounts, Deals, and Promo Codes.

Once project risks are identified and quantitatively analyzed, the project manager needs to make decisions. Having created probabilistic models of project risks, powerful methods of decision science can be brought to bear in making optimal plans and creating contingencies.
While some strategies can be executed concurrently with proactive management, risk can also be transferred or eliminated using carefully-planned strategies. These methods open the possibility of smarter decisions with more risk-neutral tactics that take advantage of capital markets. Financial approaches to transferring risk by insurance, catastrophe bonding, and other mechanisms is a poorly understood but efficacious method for dealing with unique risks on large and potential consequential projects.
By leveraging the appropriate tools for estimation using Bayesian thinking, classical utility theory, and behavioral economics, the project management executive or project owner can exploit risk to their advantage. The opportunities for construction firms, facility managers, municipal governments, and investors is enormous and growing.
This course is part of the Project Risk Management: Effective Decision Making Strategies Professional Certificate.

What you'll learn

  • Project decision making considering risk aversion and utility, calculating risk premiums using quantitative project risk models.
  • Risk transfer via insurance and re-insurance. What are insurance and re-insurance and why can project managers use insurance, bonds, and other financial instruments?
  • How to transfer risk and reduce transaction costs? How much should the PM pay to transfer risk?
  • What is Alternative Risk Transfer (ART), including insurance-linked securities, risk pools, resilience bonds, and other instruments, and how can projects make use of them?
  • What are catastrophe (CAT) bonds? When and where are they most useful?

Syllabus

Week 1: Decision Making
Week 2: Risk Aversion and utility theory
Week 3: Risk Transfer via Insurance
Week 4: Re-Insurance industry
Week 5: Cat Bonds and alternative risk transfer

Go to Class
MOOC List is learner-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Related Courses

Supply Chain Management: A Decision-Making Framework (edX) EdX
LouvainX,Université Catholique de Louvain - UCL

Supply Chain Management: A Decision-Making Framework (edX)

Learn how to make rational and confident supply chain decisions, by understanding how they impact the finance, market and strategy of your company. In this business and management course, you’ll learn how make effective supply chain decisions that take into consideration all aspects of your business.

Self Paced
Self-Paced
Introducción a la Ingeniería del Software (edX) EdX
Universidad Autonoma de Madrid,UAMx

Introducción a la Ingeniería del Software (edX)

Conoce las distintas fases de desarrollo por las que pasa un proyecto informático, así como las actividades de gestión necesarias para lograr finalizar el proyecto con éxito. ¿Alguna vez te has preguntado qué es y para qué sirve la Ingeniería de Software? ¿Quieres saber por qué es tan necesaria esta disciplina y por qué se utiliza tanto en entornos tecnológicos? ¿O cuál es el motivo de que muchos proyectos informáticos no finalizan en tiempo y coste o con la calidad deseada?

Self Paced
Self-Paced
Accounting for Decision-Making (edX) EdX
Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore,IIMBx

Accounting for Decision-Making (edX)

Learn how to read and interpret financial statements and manage costs to take informed business decisions. In order for a manager to effectively perform their role they must have an understanding of accounting information, as accounting systems generate information that is used by both internal and external stakeholders. Having a good understanding of accounting allows managers to communicate with the finance department, bankers, suppliers and even tax authorities.

Self Paced
Self-Paced
Business Foundations (edX) EdX
The University of British Columbia,UBCx

Business Foundations (edX)

This is business in a nutshell; learn key concepts and frameworks that underpin business. Do you speak “business"? You will. This course is designed to give you the terminology, concepts and frameworks necessary to understand businesses, to unpack their constituent parts, and to build your own tool-kit for strategy and decision-making.

Self Paced
Self-Paced
Analytics for Decision Making (edX) EdX
Babson College

Analytics for Decision Making (edX)

Discover the foundational concepts that support modern data science and learn to analyze various data types and quality to make smart business decisions. Want to know how to avoid bad decisions with data? Making good decisions with data can give you a distinct competitive advantage in business. This statistics and data analysis course will help you understand the fundamental concepts of sound statistical thinking that can be applied in surprisingly wide contexts, sometimes even before there is any data! Key concepts like understanding variation, perceiving relative risk of alternative decisions, and pinpointing sources of variation will be highlighted.

Self Paced
Self-Paced
Luxury Management (edX) EdX
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University,HKPolyUx

Luxury Management (edX)

Understand the power of a luxury brand and gain the business skills needed to provide premium goods and services within the hotel and tourism industry. Learn strategies and skills for managing luxury brands within the hotel and tourism industry. You will analyze the essence of a luxury brand and learn marketing techniques and trends to better position your services. You will learn how luxury brands are created and how to properly communicate the value of your brand.

Sep 4th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Financial Accounting Made Fun: Eliminating Your Fears (edX) EdX
Babson College

Financial Accounting Made Fun: Eliminating Your Fears (edX)

Learn the language of financial accounting and how to use financial statement information to better manage and grow your business. Are financial statements a mystery to you? Do all those terms and metrics make your head spin? Do you avoid conversations with your finance leaders because you are not confident of your finance ability?

Self Paced
Self-Paced
Project Management: Mastering Complexity (edX) EdX
Delft University of Technology,DelftX

Project Management: Mastering Complexity (edX)

Develop the project management skills you need to handle complexity in engineering, infrastructure and other large projects. Underestimating project complexity is widely accepted as one of the major causes of project failure. Based on international benchmarking activities (Merrow, 2010), we know that an average of 40% of projects do not deliver what they promised; for megaprojects in the oil and gas industry this figure is even worse (Ernst&Young, 2014).

Self Paced
5-12 Weeks
Innovating in Health Care (edX) EdX
HarvardX,Harvard University

Innovating in Health Care (edX)

Find innovation opportunities in health care technology, management, consulting, or investing by examining health care cost, quality, and access. Health care spending, quality, and access continue to plague America and global nations alike. With U.S. health care costs trending toward $4 trillion in 2020, the need to innovate and create smart, viable business plans is more important than ever before. Innovating in Health Care (IHC) explores how creating successful global business ventures in health care will not only improve access, but also better meet the needs of consumers and societies.

Self Paced
Self-Paced
Gestion de projets de développement (edX) EdX
Inter-American Development Bank - IDB,IDBx

Gestion de projets de développement (edX)

Apprenez les meilleures pratiques de gestion de projet pour promouvoir le développement socioéconomique en Amérique latine et dans les Caraïbes. Jour après jour les institutions publiques, les organisations non gouvernementales, les agences de développement ainsi que d'autres acteurs travaillant en faveur du développement économique et social en Amérique latine et dans les Caraïbes, font face à un défi majeur. Il s'agit de savoir comment transformer les propositions en réalités concrètes qui puissent améliorer le bien-être de la société et d'atteindre les résultats avec le temps et les ressources disponibles.

Self Paced
Self-Paced