Vanessa Richardson is a certified Risk Management Professional (PMI-RMP). Her career began as a Logistics Officer for the US Army. There Ms. Richardson led maintenance, logistics, risk management, and emergency planning operations for major capital ground and aviation units in Oklahoma, Colorado, South Korea, and Iraq. Just shy of six years of service, Ms. Richardson received an Honorable Discharge.
After the Army, Ms. Richardson was hired to help Red Cashew, a luxurious destination spa design firm. As Director of Operations and Project Manager, she led five projects while organizing the start-up and relocation of the company from Colorado to California.
In 2008 Ms. Richardson joined MWH, INC where she led risk management on four major capital hydropower plant rehabilitation projects with construction costs totaling $3B for the British Columbia Hydropower Authority, BC Hydro. Vanessa also developed and led implementation of the pilot of the Project Delivery Risk Management framework. She created similar governance frameworks for the program delivery divisions of Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) and San Jose-Santa Clara Wastewater Facility.
In 2014, Vanessa began Cygnal Consulting, LLC in order to offer scalable, comprehensive risk management programs to businesses large and small. She has pioneered Values Driven Decision Making. Ms. Richardson insists Cygnal's solutions be implementable and useful so that every solution is informed by those who will be called upon to implement them. That separates Cygnal from the rest. Your teams appreciate our solutions.
Vanessa was selected to participate as a risk authority in the 2013 PMI-Risk Management Professional Role Delineation Study and Examination Update
Ms. Richardson received her BS in Environmental Geography and Systems Engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point.
