ENGINEERING PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Engineering Project Management

Engineering Project Management

Introduction

The characteristics of the construction industry include product uniqueness, on-site production, and ad hoc project teams with high turnover rate. Subsequently, it has been difficult for the construction industry to coordinate, store, and reuse knowledge that is obtained between the organization and its individuals. Therefore, the construction industry needs to acquire, store and reuse knowledge in order to increase project performance. Previous studies had suggested the organization should conduct knowledge management through methods of project reports or lessons learned.

In this paper, the proposed ORM approach was found helpful for the selected contractor when conducting the project risk management. For the project manager (PM), this approach could be of assistance in risk identification, analysis and response. In addition to increasing RM effectiveness, the study verified that the project risk ontology could be developed through acquiring tacit knowledge and extracting explicit knowledge from the organization. To summarize, in this study the ORM approach could support the contractor by increasing effectiveness of RM workflow on the basis of implementing knowledge management.

Construction risk management

Research studies indicated that RM procedure was widely accepted as the chief role to affect RM. A good procedure design enabled a systematic and consistent approach to implement RM; hence, many studies were dedicated to research the RM procedure , Moreover, since risk management was important to project performance, it had also been built into “A guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK guide)” framework proposed by . Through case studies, it was also proved that the approach and tool mentioned in the PMBOK guide were influential to project performance.

More recently, after construction companies began to adopt RM techniques to analyze risks, the following studies recommended that organizations should use qualitative or quantitative techniques to analyze risk . By analogy, qualitative, rather than quantitative, techniques were widely accepted by the construction industries initially. In later years, when the construction companies became familiar with RM techniques, increasingly quantitative techniques were adopted. Further, it has been indicated that organizations could identify the most appropriate RM application techniques by combination of qualitative, semi-quantitative, and quantitative techniques. In their study, another RM problem for the construction industry was proposed, as well: the organizations usually employed more risk identification and evaluation than risk response and record. By employing less risk response and record, verification for knowledge reuse would be lacking and difficult to apply to the subsequent projects. Thus, it could be concluded that construction RM shall be conducted based on the organization's requirements by using the formal and systematic RM technique. Furthermore, the RM knowledge database shall be renewed via audits and records to achieve the purpose of knowledge reuse and the enhancement of RM performance.

Development of ORM framework

The development of the ORM framework included four primary domains: (1) the development of project risk ontology; (2) the extraction of the risk knowledge base; (3) the establishment of the ORM approach; and (4) the dynamic ontology extraction tool. Based on the verified model of the ontology development and ...