Demarcating Risk Management Responsibilities of a Project Manager

Most of the standards and process models are not explicit enough about demarcating risk management responsibilities of project managers. Usually, they place them entirely on a project level. In this paper, we study the risk management responsibilities of project managers within 53 software companies. Our goal is to find out what exactly project managers do within pre-project and project activities such as requirements, project and task planning and what risk management responsibilities they have within these activities. Our results show that the responsibility portfolio of project managers varies depending on the degree of their engagement within pre-project and project phases; the broader the project managers´ responsibility portfolio, the broader their risk management responsibility portfolio.