Risk management, a process aiming to decrease or eliminate the likelihood and impact of unwanted effects on a project during its lifecycle, has become highly significant due to complexity, uncertainties and high competition. Numerous tools and techniques have been developed for successfully implementing risk management. However, risk is frequently inadequately addressed and existing tools and knowledge are not used and exploited at a high degree. This research examines current practices of the risk management process and identifies barriers and opportunities pointing to improve its implementation through the exploitation of information and knowledge of past projects. The investigated knowledge and information focus on project drivers, characteristics and other KPI’s. The empirical study of the research incorporates the analysis of seven risk registers/projects of Witteveen+Bos and development of interviews of W+B risk and project managers involved in the analyzed projects. Subsequently, validation of the results is achieved through extra interviews of risk management experts external to Witteveen+Bos and a conceptual framework is developed. The last step of this qualitative research entails the validation of the conceptual framework which is tested with a case study implemented through an online workshop and a questionnaire.
By analyzing the literature findings and empirical data, it is concluded that information and knowledge management during the implementation of risk management are not adequately developed while simultaneously constitute a major barrier to its success. Therefore, a conceptual framework that incorporates a way of structuring risk related information is developed while targeting to also tackle certain identified barriers of the current procedures such as the understanding of risk structure to the whole project and the adequate exchange of information during the process.
The framework suggests a higher quality use of risk registers while structuring information and afterwards exploiting the information for capturing lessons that can be reused in future projects. It provides a way of clustering information during the development of projects and at the same time incorporates the development and use of risk networks. The development of risk networks is initiated by grouping risks based on their source. The aforementioned sources are selected based on the results of the research and named ‘Key Sources’. The aim of using risk networks is to increase risk insights while displaying risk exposure visually. In this way barriers such as lower understanding of risks, incomplete communication of risks as well as short term view of risks may be addressed or eliminated. Another part of the framework concerns the development of evaluation concerning the process as well as the description of risk related information. It is concluded that even though, there is a wide array of identified barriers to the effectiveness of risk management implementation, overcoming information and knowledge management barriers can constitute a higher level way of overcoming other barriers as well.