**5. Project stakeholders**

414 Risk Management – Current Issues and Challenges

outcome of the risk management study.

that the project manager is usually not trained for.

**4. Risk manager role** 

Vose (2008).

assessment of the project.

managing risks.

neutral element of the project team and can reduce the bias, which can seriously affect the

The relevance that a risk manager plays during the implementation phase is crucial for the success of the study. The RM as a risk expert should be able to lead, coordinate, educate, explain, convince, propose, monitor and evaluate the entire process; plus he or she needs to be able to have experience in leading teams from different backgrounds and coming from different functional units and agencies. Vose (2008) enounces the following as the characteristics of the risk analysts: creative thinkers, confident, modest, thick-skinned, communicators, pragmatic, able to conceptualize, curious, good at mathematics, a feel for numbers, finishers, cynical, pedantic, careful, social and neutral. The reality is that we not always can find individuals that have all the virtues mentioned before, therefore; we need to select the most critical characteristics that a risk manager should have. Definitely a risk manager should be a good communicator, must have an analytical mind and needs to be able to think outside the box. The skills of a risk manager are somehow related to the project manager's, in the sense of managing and controlling. However, the risk manager needs to deal with risk assessment that in the quantitative arena requires analytical modelling skills

It is a demanding list and indicates; that risk analysis should be performed by people who have a proven track record of doing risk management for several projects ideally. It is also rather unlikely to find these skills in one person: the best risk analyst units with which we work are composed of a number of individuals with complementary skills and strengths

The Washington State Department of Transportation ([WSDOT], 2010) in their Guidelines for CRA-CEVP Workshops, enlisted some of the risk manager responsibility: risk elicitation, risk modelling, cost validation/review, lead meetings, and provides reports and Develops or implements workshops on topics such as project definition, and risk identification and management. The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans, 2007) describes the risk manager (Risk Officer) responsibilities as risk management planning, identification, qualitative

It is very important to take into consideration that the person selected or named to become the risk manager, should be someone that in addition of having the minimum capabilities, should be a neutral team element that can guide the risk team towards a non biased risk

Although the position of RM in public agencies and private companies is rather new; currently the importance of having such an expert formally within the organization structure has become more formal and demanded. It has been realized that the benefits of having such an expert are much higher than the losses caused by not properly assessing and

and quantitative analysis, risk response and risk monitoring and control. See Figure 3.

Due to the nature of the transportation projects, several stakeholders are usually involved. In particular, there is a closed communication between other local, regional and federal agencies which need to be involved and provide assessments and feedback. Caltrans as a state agency, deal internally as well with several stakeholders coming from the different functional units or divisions.

For the above reasons, it is extremely important to develop project communication plans, so the right stakeholders can be identified, together with investigating the best ways of communication with them critical project information for decision making. Figure 4 shows a typical stakeholder analysis used at Caltrans, which is part of the project communication plan.

As can be seen, the stakeholder analysis aid in selecting those stakeholders that could play a relevant role in the project. For the PM, is important to know which is the prefer way for communicating with each stakeholder, since he needs to keep them informed at all times. The frequency is another factor which needs to be addressed carefully, some people like to be informed about every change or movement in the project and others, only want to receive updates related to considerable changes in scope, time or cost for example.
