Risk Management and Response Planning for Successful Project Execution

Developed by David Rühmkorf

In a time of growing global competition, the outcome of projects is crucial to an organization's business result. Despite this, many projects still suffer from postponements, scope changes, failures, and cancellations. These issues can stem from inadequate risk management practices in projects such as risk identification and decision-making. The objective of project risk management is to enhance the likelihood of favorable outcomes and reduce the probability of potential risks to rise the chances of project success. The PMBOK® Guide describes that unhandled risk can result in deviations from the project strategy and hinder the accomplishment of the project goals. As a result, the outcome of a project is closely linked to the effectiveness of project risk management.

One method that served already as an adequate tool in various areas for identifying risks is the FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis). By applying an FMEA the project team is able to detect potential risks before they occur, assess their impact on the project outcome and implement appropriate measures to reduce or prevent them. For an enhancing evaluation and assessment of the measures, a cost-benefit analysis can be carried out anlong with the FMEA. By conducting this additional method it can be checked to what extent the execution of the measure makes sense from an economic point of view with regard to the respective project. Overall, it can be crucial for organizations to integrate these methods into their project risk management processes to ensure the achievement of project goals and business results.

Method description

FMEA

FMEA is a systematic, qualitative method from risk management that is suitable for the identification, analysis and evaluation of risks. The aim of its application is to detect and prevent defects at an early stage in order to optimize product and process risks. Depending on the area of application, a number of different methods can be used in practice. The different types include design, system and process FMEA. A total of seven steps are considered for performing an FMEA. Each steps helps to further develop and to understand the risk profile of a product or a process. 1. Planning and Preparation 2. Structure analysis 3. Function analysis 4. Failure analysis 5. Risk analysis 6. Optimization 7. Result documentation With the help of the FMEA, the identified risks can be evaluated and assessed. For the evaluation, the severity(s), occurrence(o) and detection(d) of the failures are considered. Based on the risk assessment, the risk priority number (RPN) can be formed as a measure for analyzing the risk. The RPN is calculated by multiplying the three categories s, o and d and is between 1 and 1000. This means that the higher the RPN, the more necessary it is from a risk management point of view to consider a measure to improve the number. The RPN alone, however, is not a sufficient technique to draw conclusions for evaluating the risks due to the equal weighting of the categories. For the following reason, the FMEA Handbook of the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) and the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA) has additionally introduced the action priority (AP). This method was created to assign different weights to the categories. In this case severity is given the highest priority, followed by occurrence and finally discovery. Based on this change, the involved participants can make better decisions to prevent future problems. FMEA Handbook. The following article will mainly focus on steps 4,5 and 6 of the FMEA taking into account the cost-benefit analysis.