
What counts as a project and what is ongoing work
The four stages a project moves through
The role of whoever leads it, and the main difficulties
The PMBOK 7 principles and performance domains
Collecting ideas and turning them into a proposal
Building the business case and the charter
Cost-benefit analysis and the accompanying documentation
Choosing which project to run, which is the first risk decision anyone makes
Identifying stakeholders, including the ones nobody named
Compiling and prioritising the list
Assessing influence and interest
Planning engagement, and the Stakeholders performance domain
Establishing that the work is needed at all
Defining where it starts and ends
Setting boundaries and documenting assumptions, which is where most risk hides
The development approach and life cycle domain
Breaking the project into parts and labelling them
Describing the plan as a diagram
Identifying risks during planning rather than afterwards
Time planning and the network diagram
Time planning methods and estimating durations you can defend
Displaying the schedule, including the Gantt chart
Identifying participants across functions
Using a resource matrix, and the Team performance domain
Project cost and its different types
The three stages of a budget
Identifying and assessing risk factors
Risk management, and the Uncertainty performance domain
Building the structure for the project
Operating in a matrix, where nobody reports to you
Defining roles and responsibilities and allocating tasks
Kicking off and then running the team
What project control actually means
The progress reporting system and monitoring spend
Handling deviations before they become the status update
Communicating progress and running the meetings
Planning closure rather than letting the work trail off
Handling the administration
Surveying results with the people who received them
Bringing the PMBOK 7 principles together at the end
Decision-making as the origin of most organisational damage
What the global financial crisis demonstrated about it
What human risks are, as distinct from technical ones
Current research on risk in managing people
The risk heat map
An example of risk management applied to people
The fraud triangle and the safety triangle
The people-risk thermal imager and the risk triangle
How decisions are actually made under pressure
Cognitive biases, and which ones distort an estimate most
Conflict of interest, including the kind nobody declares
Examples of human risk in practice
The 4I model
Incidents and what they reveal about the control environment
Risk at individual level, at company level, and by industry
Risk management as a discipline, and ISO 31000
The risk hierarchy, and internal versus external risk
Finding and assessing risk
Eliminating, reducing or escalating it
Management maturity as a risk factor in its own right
The dynamics inside a senior team
The role of the sponsor
The warning signs that precede most project failures
Cultural context and what it permits people to say
Building a risk culture deliberately
Company values under pressure
Trust as a control mechanism
The three lines of defence
Reducing risk structurally rather than by exhortation
The high-reliability organisation
Managing risk with a team, and auditing the environment around it
Surfacing what nobody is currently looking at
Improving the decision-making process itself
A decision-making checklist you can actually use
What a code of conduct has to contain to function as a control
The role description as an accountability instrument
Where personal responsibility begins in a system
What critical thinking is and why it is a risk competency
How it differs from logical and from creative thinking
Its role in work and in business
The basic principles: objectivity, rationality, evidence
Types of argument: deduction, induction, abduction
What makes an argument strong and what makes one merely confident
Building a convincing case for a risk nobody wants to hear about
Recognising errors in reasoning, including in your own
What cognitive biases are
The most common: confirmation bias, anchoring, framing
How anchoring in particular destroys an estimate
Practical techniques for reducing their effect
Distinguishing a fact from an opinion in a status report
Verifying accuracy
Evaluating sources: primary against secondary
Fact-checking as a working skill
The decision models: OODA, Cynefin, cost-benefit
Using analysis and argument to actually choose
Managing risk and uncertainty rather than waiting for clarity
Cases from business and from ordinary life
Application across business, education and personal decisions
Critical thinking inside a negotiation
Its connection with creativity and innovation
Building a development plan for the skill
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Ask five people on a late project what went wrong and you get five answers. Ask them when they first suspected it and you usually get the same month, several months before anyone said so out loud.
The risk was not unknown. It was unspoken.
Why risk registers do not prevent anything
The register was filled in during week one to satisfy a governance requirement and never opened again. The entries are generic — resource availability, scope creep — which describe categories rather than risks and therefore have no owner and no trigger. The estimate everybody privately doubts is in the plan anyway, because anchoring is stronger than arithmetic and nobody wants to be the person who makes the timeline worse.
Then the risk arrives on schedule, and the post-mortem discovers that four people saw it coming.
Planning, and risk as a discipline
Thirty-eight lessons. Ten on the project apparatus by PMBOK 7, because risk lives inside planning rather than beside it: business case and charter, stakeholder mapping, scope boundaries and documented assumptions, work breakdown, network diagrams, Gantt, the three-stage budget, the Uncertainty domain, matrix team structure, control, and closure.
Then ten on risk as its own discipline: heat maps, the fraud triangle, the safety triangle, cognitive bias and conflict of interest, the 4I model, incident analysis, ISO 31000 applied end to end, the warning signs inside a senior team, culture as either a control or a risk generator, the three lines of defence, and a decision-making checklist.
Thinking clearly, documenting, and responding
Then six on critical thinking, which is the underrated half of risk work. Argument structure, weak arguments that sound strong, confirmation bias, anchoring, separating fact from opinion in a status report, and decision models — OODA, Cynefin, cost-benefit — that tell you what kind of situation you are actually in before you decide.
Then six on documenting processes, because an undocumented process cannot be assessed and its controls cannot be checked: methodology, BPMN, tooling, implementation, five worked examples, and running a documentation project including defending it.
And six on what happens when a risk materialises: staffing a project people know is exposed, cutting cost without losing the team, closing a capability gap with no money, deciding who stays, communicating hard news, and restoring a sense of safety, which takes longer than the disruption did.
Who is teaching this
Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. The risk material draws on the human side of failure, which is where most project risk actually originates and where registers rarely look.
What is included
Lifetime access to all course materials
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
Udemy Certificate of Completion
Practical assignments and real business cases
A section with additional courses, tools and resources
A question for your current project
Ask each person privately what they think is most likely to go wrong, and whether they have said so to anyone. The gap between those two answers is your real risk register, and it is usually more accurate than the official one. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.