NASA Risk-Informed Decision Making Handbook

Homayoon Dezfuli, Ph.D.
Project Manager, NASA Headquarters
April 2010

Risk management (RM) is an integral aspect of virtually every challenging human endeavor, but well-defined RM processes have only recently begun to be developed and implemented as an integral part of systems engineering at NASA, given the complex concepts that RM encapsulates and the many forms it can take. However, few will disagree that effective risk management is critical to program and project success.
Recent NASA RM processes have been based on Continuous Risk Management (CRM), which stresses the management of risk during implementation. In December of 2008, NASA issued NPR 8000.4A [1], which introduced Risk-Informed Decision Making (RIDM) as a complementary process to CRM that is concerned with analysis of important and/or direction-setting decisions. Before, RM was considered equivalent to CRM; now, RM is defined as comprising both CRM and RIDM.
This handbook addresses the RIDM component of RM. ..................Handbook access....