Risk and vulnerability management, project agility and resilience: a comparative analysis

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to present a critical analysis of the project management literature on four concepts; risk management, vulnerability management, project agility and project resilience. The goal is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of these concepts to deal with disruptive events through the development of a conceptual framework that captures their differences and convergences. Therefore, a review of recent literature from international journals, specialized mainly in project risk management, vulnerability management, project agility, and project resilience has been conducted. A systematic literature review is adopted to compare the four key concepts of this study and to draw conclusions. A case from the information technology field is used to better illustrate the comparison.Results from this study show that risk management and vulnerability management are proactive concepts focusing on the management of known events or actions. Alternatively, project agility is a reactive concept that aims to adapt to changes, but not necessarily disruptive events. Project resilience is a mix concept – proactive and reactive – focusing on recovering from known and unknown disruptive events. In addition, this comparative analysis and the conceptual framework developed can be used to exploit future areas of research and exhibit new opportunities where project management best practices can be improved to deal with disruptive events.