Inherent interest conflicts between a project management team and project owner are often neglected in project risk management. Risk management by the project management team basically focuses on project short-term survival, or project success toward handover to the customer, while for the project owner, strategic success should be more important. To see how this takes place in and influences real projects, seven large projects were studied, and interaction in project risk management between the project owners and project management team was examined for each project. The study revealed that the main focus in the studied projects was on operational risks, even within the project owner's set of high-priority risks.
In a hierarchy of project objectives, strategic objectives will often be principally different from the operational ones. Operational objectives concern the project outputs/results, and strategic objectives concern the project goal and purpose. In this study, risks are categorized as risks to operational, long‐term, or short‐term strategic objectives, and, by studying a dataset of some 1,450 risk elements that make up the risk registers of seven large projects, we examine how operational and strategic risks are distributed in the projects. The study strongly indicates that risks to a project's strategic objectives rarely occur in the project's risk registers, though project success and failure stories indicate their importance.
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