Risks vs. opportunities

Opportunities first appear in academic research or management books in the 1990s. The first PMBoK Project Management Body of Knowledge draft of 1987 doesn't mention opportunities at all.

Modern project management school does recognize the importance of opportunities. Opportunities have been included in project management literature since the 1990s, e.g. in PMBoK, and became a significant part of project risk management in the years 2000s, when articles titled “opportunity management” also begin to appear in library searches. Opportunity management thus became an important part of risk management.

Modern risk management theory deals with any type of external events, positive and negative. Positive risks are called opportunities. Similarly to risks, opportunities have specific mitigation strategies: exploit, share, enhance, ignore.

In practice, risks are considered “usually negative”. Risk-related research and practice focus significantly more on threats than on opportunities. This can lead to negative phenomena such as target fixation.