Risk identification of engineering design project based on fundamental model of risk chain mechanism

Abstract

Any engineering design project faces various types of uncertainties. They cause risk that a project goal cannot be accomplished within lead time. A design project manager should identify potential risk factors and causal relations among them in a project. Although it is worthwhile to spend much time on a workshop for project members to understand unnoticed risks, it is often a hard job to identify risk factors and causal relations in a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive way. This paper proposes a risk identification method based on a framework schematizing a fundamental model of a risk chain mechanism in an engineering design project in order to support a project manager and project members to systematically identify potential risk factors and causal relations among them. A proposed method provides categories of typical risk factors in an engineering design project. A typical chain mechanism among those categories is also defined. Those elements in a fundamental model can facilitate a project manager and project members to find unnoticed factors in a project. A case study of a risk workshop for a student formula car design project is demonstrated to show that the proposed method facilitates project members to understand potential risk factors and to build a comprehensive risk chain model.