Opportunity

May 16, 2025
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What is Opportunity?

In project management, opportunity refers to a potential positive event or condition that, if it occurs, could improve the project’s performance. This might include reducing costs, shortening timelines, increasing benefits, or enhancing outcomes.  Opportunities are considered a type of risk, specifically, a positive risk. Using standard risk management processes, the team identifies, assesses, and manages them like threats. Recognizing and acting on them can help project teams gain competitive advantages and deliver greater value to stakeholders.

Opportunities are not guaranteed. They represent a chance for improvement that depends on internal or external conditions. Project managers should actively seek them during project planning and execution. Unlike threats, which the team must mitigate, they may exploit, enhance, share, or accept opportunities, depending on their nature and the project’s strategic goals.

Key Points

  • It is a potential positive outcome that may benefit a project.
  • The team manages it through the risk management process, just like a threat.
  • It can reduce cost, time, or resource usage, or increase value or efficiency.
  • They may arise from internal factors (team capabilities) or external factors (market conditions).
  • Effectively managing them can improve overall project performance.

Related Terms

  • The risk management plan outlines how threats and opportunities will be identified, assessed, and managed throughout the project.
  • A positive risk is another way to describe an opportunity in project risk terminology.
  • SWOT analysis helps identify strengths and opportunities as well as weaknesses and threats.
  • Project benefits management often includes capturing and maximizing opportunities to enhance outcomes.
  • The project charter may list initial opportunities that justify project initiation.

Opportunity: Example

A project team working on a new software product discovers a recently released open-source tool to automate a key development task. This tool can reduce development time by 25%. The team chooses to incorporate the tool, allowing the project to finish ahead of schedule and under budget. This use of a new tool that the team successfully identified and exploited is an example of an opportunity.

Opportunity: Best Practices

  • Include the identification of opportunities as a regular part of risk review meetings.
  • Encourage team members to report beneficial trends, tools, or events.
  • Use qualitative and quantitative assessments to evaluate potential benefits.
  • Align its management with overall project goals and stakeholder expectations.
  • Document and track it to measure their impact and inform future projects.

Additional Resources

Opportunity - Project Risk Management: Processes, Techniques and Insights     Opportunity - Benefits Realization Management: A Practice Guide

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