It’s often said that a lot of projects can be improved by taking away uncertainty. The common way to practice this is risk management. Currently a lot of frameworks & standards are at our disposition to deploy this, such as IS0 31000.

The feeling that more grip on the project (more certainty) is required typically arises from the ‘delusion of control’. Prior negative experiences do contribute to enforce this perception. And often risk management is seen as just not meeting up to the expectation of a ‘pro-active’ safeguarding management system for new, innovative products in development.

Risk management can not cover all risks nor none at all, it should be well dosed. Performing little or no risk management is clearly is not an option in the management of time, performance & budgets for innovation projects.

Between no risk management at all and a 100% certainty risk management, a tremendous increase in efforts & costs of risk management emerge. How is dosing possible ? And upto what extend ? An very appropriate threshold is the point when the gain equals (not exceeds) the pain. Risk management becomes very adequate when the difference between effectiveness of the risk measures and the costs of the management are equal.

By Frederik Wouters (Director Business Development, Verhaert)

VERHAERT offers workshops for governments & organizations where policy makers are being guided in building up strategies & future developments.

Recently (February 2013, VERHAERT Masters in Innovation was asked by the Flemish Department of Culture, Youth, Sports & Media to organize a brainstorm session for leading officials to generate propositions for the upcoming Flemish Government period for 2014-2019. Based on the results of this first gathering, the officials can further develop different scenarios to prepare this upcoming reign. This department is responsible for policy making in many area’s, including culture infrastructure e-culture, film, culture education, diversity, digitization of cultural heritage.

Our consultants took care of the organization & structuring of the questioning, exercises, guidance for all different participants & departments to achieve. Feedback shows that the organization was very happy with the approach and the results.

Read more about this department

VERHAERT offers workshops for governments & organizations where policy makers are being guided in building up strategies & future developments.

Recently (February 2013, VERHAERT Masters in Innovation was asked by the Flemish Department of Culture, Youth, Sports & Media to organize a brainstorm session for leading officials to generate propositions for the upcoming Flemish Government period for 2014-2019. Based on the results of this first gathering, the officials can further develop different scenarios to prepare this upcoming reign. This department is responsible for policy making in many area’s, including culture infrastructure e-culture, film, culture education, diversity, digitization of cultural heritage.

Our consultants took care of the organization & structuring of the questioning, exercises, guidance for all different participants & departments to achieve. Feedback shows that the organization was very happy with the approach and the results.

Read more about this department

VERHAERT has joined DSP Valley 2.0, an totally renewed network organization that is active in the domains of smart systems focusing on the design of hardware and embedded software technology for (digital) signal processing systems and System-on-Chip (SoC). That is also exactly what their name claims: Designing Smart Products. DSP Valley groups 80+ members: universities, research institutes and companies, from small start-ups, over SMEs to large international groups with a local R&D activity. Within this renewed working platform DSP Valley 2.0, they were looking for real product developers for the area of supply chain for the smart products & smart application branch. This made VERHAERT very interesting to cooperate with.

Members are active in the broad domain of embedded technology, from electronics over software to full-blown high-tech products. They are involved in the whole value chain from design (including tools) over manufacturing to producing and marketing of dedicated hardware/software components and finished products.

DSP Valley offers its members a networking platform that allows them to explore each other’s expertise and that stimulates innovation by exploiting complementarities.

Because VERHAERT is a product development company, specialized in smart & digital products, it is our pleasure to be part of this great organization. VERHAERT will therefor also be providing its premisses for the next DSP Valley membership meeting.

Visit their website here and learn more about their services!

The next ‘Risk Management in integrated R&D processes’ training is scheduled for Thursday June 6th 2013 in Kruibeke (B). Subscribe now online!

This training highlights how risk management for R&D projects differs from risk management approaches in general project management.

This training course offers you new and clear insights on effective risk management in the New Product Development process. We provide you with methods & tools to guide you through pitfalls & organizational difficulties and show you how to implement these, to make risk management more successfully.

The basis for successful projects & products lies in the capabilities of managing risks effectively. You have to make it an inherent part of the development process and avoid being subjective. By aligning business project & product risk, a more systematic view on risk can be established.

The importance & role of requirements in risk management will be explained and real-life cases of different risk management tools will be illustrated.