PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Project Management

Project Management

Risk management encompasses the activities dealing with risks after they are identified and evaluated. Risk management, as well as risk assessment and risk communication, are part of the comprehensive term of risk governance, which is a systematic approach toward coping with risks under participation of all relevant actors (government, companies, the scientific community, nongovernmental organizations, and the general public). Risk management starts as soon as there is sufficient evidence for hazards identified and evaluated by risk assessment.

Risk management is also dealing with identified concerns that were analyzed by concern assessment based on risk perception studies, economy impact assessment, and the scientific characterization of social responses to risk source. At present, the production and use of engineered synthetic nanoparticles show high evidence of risks in this field. There are particular concerns about the use of nanoparticles in feed and cosmetics. However, different nanotechnologies and specific applications require different risk management strategies.

Human-Caused Risks: Critical Infrastructure Failure

Risk management is also an important factor in human-made disasters. As disasters bring impacts on human beings and their communities, disasters may also be brought about by the failure of critical infrastructure systems. This can occur in two ways: first, a disaster can occur when a hazardous physical system fails, causing a release of toxins or an explosion—the environmental risk. For example, a 1984 chemical leak at a chemical plant in Bhopal, India, caused the release of a highly toxic gas that killed several thousand people. In 2010, a deepwater oil drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, instantly killing 11 workers, and dumping nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf. The oil spill caused lasting environmental and economic impacts across the Gulf region. Second, an infrastructure disaster can occur when a critical system, such as electricity generation and transmission systems failing, causing a number of other linked systems to fail along with it, and impacting the communities that rely on systems for social functioning—this is called the reliance risk. A “cascading disaster” occurs with the breakdown of systems upon which other systems and the social fabric of a community rely.

The northeast blackout of 2003 affected 55 million people for several days. As power went down across the northeastern United States, it impacted infrastructure and manufacturing across a variety of sectors, from water supply to transportation and communication networks, and shut down industrial manufacturing for several days.

Managing the environmental risk from infrastructure failures means both managing the system so it does not fail—developing standard safety procedures, training employees, and developing failsafe measures—and developing mitigation and containment processes to reduce the likelihood that something harmful will escape. Safety protocols and training require resource devotion by management to ensure that employees are able to understand and take actions to control the system, recognize when the system has begun to act abnormally (ideally through pattern recognition), and are trained on how to respond when the system begins behaving abnormally.

Because such systems are large and complex, these observations and tasks often require organized action among groups ...