Project Robustness can not be achieved only by throwing resources to the project

Risks exist in every projects and they can threaten the success of the project. There has been a lot of discussion about risk management in the project management literature and among the practitioners. Overall the objective of the risk management is to identify the risks, analyze their effect and plan for a mitigation strategy for them. Apart from the solution which may exist in some projects to eliminate the source of risk, other strategies tend to add excess resources to the project to reduce the effect of the risk. These strategies could be known by the names: project safeguarding, adding contingencies or creating buffers in the project plans. Basically these strategies are based on designing and planning for a project optimistically and then adding a surplus to mitigate the risks.

However creating Robustness in a project is different. It is not about adding extra resources.

Robust Design which is a method developed by Geneichi Taguchi argues that to develop a product which can satisfy a certain need(function) there are many different alternative designs. Out of the different alternatives one of the designs may provide the maximum value for the function in interest. However this design may not be able to provide the maximum function all the time, under different conditions and in uncertain environment. In other words the design with the maximum function may not have the highest robustness to uncertainties.

The same is valid for projects. An optimistic project(or say project plan) may not be the most robust project. Usually projects(the product, the deliverables) can be designed in different ways or project plans regarding scheduling, organization and many more can be planned in many different way. Robustness is about what project design would create least sensitivity of project objectives to change in the project environment(uncertainties). It may also mean to sacrifize optimality for less deviation from the objectives(robustness).

What I discussed about was the definitions. Still it is a question how project managers can create robust projects.