Project managers can't predict the future, but accurately gauging the degree of uncertainty inherent in their projects can help them quickly adapt to it.
- "Managing Project Uncertainty," Arnoud De Meyer, Christoph Loch, and Micheal Pich, Sloan Management Review, Winter 2002, Vol. 43, Issue 2, pp. 60-67.
Managing in the presence of the uncertainty that creates risk of two kinds - reducible and irreducible - requires we make estimates of the outcomes of our decisions needed to handle the reducible uncertainty or create the margin (cost, schedule, technical buffers) to protect the project from the irreducible uncertainties.