**7. Risk management team elicitation**

The selection of members for the Risk Management Team (RMT), is not an easy task at all. A depth analysis of background and education was carried on for selecting the potential members of the team. The analysis, brainstorming, experience, background of the RMT members is critical not only for the risk management identification; it is for all the process including the monitoring and control. Eliciting the risk team members can be such a critical milestone for success or failure for the rest of the risk management process and the project itself. At the end, risk management is an input-output process that if wrong data or knowledge is feed into, then the results expected, most likely would be trustless or would included biases which at the end affect seriously the integrity and best practices in risk management.

**Figure 6.** Overview of the Expert Elicitation Process (USEPA, 2011)

**Figure 5.** Knowledge and Ignorance of Humans (Ayyub, 2000),

**7. Risk management team elicitation** 

PM and the team.

Therefore, the intersection of the expert's knowledge with the ignorance space outside the knowledge base can be viewed as a measure of creativity and imagination. Another expert (i.e., Expert B) would have her/his own ellipses that might overlap with the ellipses of Expert A, and might overlap with other region by varying magnitudes (Ayyub, 2000).

SME`s are crucial for giving credible data for the risk model. If SMEs are not part of the risk management study, the results will not be trusted, causing this a failure of the process, the

The selection of members for the Risk Management Team (RMT), is not an easy task at all. A depth analysis of background and education was carried on for selecting the potential members of the team. The analysis, brainstorming, experience, background of the RMT members is critical not only for the risk management identification; it is for all the process including the monitoring and control. Eliciting the risk team members can be such a critical milestone for success or failure for the rest of the risk management process and the project itself. At the end, risk management is an input-output process that if wrong data or knowledge is feed into, then the results expected, most likely would be trustless or would included biases

which at the end affect seriously the integrity and best practices in risk management.

Expert Elicitation (EE) is a multidisciplinary process (Figure 6) that can inform decisions by characterizing uncertainty and filling data gaps where traditional scientific research is not feasible or data are not yet available. Although there are informal and nonprobabilistic EE methods for obtaining expert judgment. The goal of an EE is to characterize, to the degree possible, each expert's beliefs (typically expressed as probabilities) about relationships, quantities, events, or parameters of interest. The EE process uses expert knowledge, synthesized with experiences and judgments, to produce probabilities about their confidence in that knowledge. Experts derive judgments from the available body of evidence, including a wide range of data and information ranging from direct empirical evidence to theoretical insights. Even if direct empirical data were available on the item of interest, such measurements would not necessarily capture the full range of uncertainty. EE allows experts to use their scientific judgment transparently to interpret available empirical data and theory (Ayyub, 2011).

As mentioned by Vose (2008), it is usually impossible to obtain data from which to determine the uncertainty of all the variables within the model accurately, for a number of reasons:


The uncertainty in subjective estimates has two components: the inherent randomness of the variable itself and the uncertainty arising from the expert's lack of knowledge of the parameters that describe that variability.

Project and Enterprise Risk Management at the California Department of Transportation 421

the risks identified for each project; it can be observed the source of risk, which in Caltrans relates to the functional units (e.g. environmental, right of way, design, project management,

Project A was a Historical Bridge, Project B a Direct Access Ramp (DAR) with a Transit Station (TS) and Project C a standard bridge. The main goal of the risk analysis for each project was to determine the cost risk contingency associated to each project risk register. Figure 10 shows the critical risks obtained for each project once the qualitative analysis was performed. The qualitative assessment matrix (Figure 9) used for ranking the risk criticality,

The risk sources indicated in Figure 7 are: design, right of way (rw), environmental (env), program project management (ppm), construction (const), exterior (ext), engineering (eng)

The RM was responsible for educating the RMT along each phase of the risk management implementation. For the qualitative risk analysis in particular, it was useful to provide

As can be observed, the critical risks are only a few ones in compare with all the risks identified at the initiation phase. The purpose of the qualitative risk analysis was to select those risks that represent a major negative or positive impact into the project objectives. A critical part for performing the qualitative analysis was to define the probability and impact ranges. The impacts were defined in terms of cost only for these projects. In addition, construction, engineering and organizational risks were not part of the quantitative risk

analysis, since there were not scored as critical in the qualitative risk analysis.

forms part of Caltrans standard process for risk management.

construction etc.)

and organizational (org).

**Figure 8.** Risk matrix (Caltrans, 2007)

tangle examples to the team before and during the meeting.

In cases where there are no subject matter experts available, it is recommended to even hire external experts for obtaining the uncertainty ranges per variable or risk. Caltrans's practices towards project management and the project delivery process use a Project Development Team (PDT) which changes alongside the phases of the project. These teams are rather big in size and usually integrate stakeholders, subject matter experts and individuals coming from the same or different functional units (right of way, environmental, design, construction, etc.). Firstly, the downside of using such a team like the PDT is the size since it could be complicated for the RM to facilitate the meetings for obtaining better results towards assessing the uncertainty. In addition, the team members should feel free to talk about risk and in some cases having more than one member coming from the same division of functional unit, can cause some limitations for discussion and brainstorming.

In general, risk teams are rather small in compare with the traditional project teams. As a general rule, to invite a representative from each department or division is recommended. This approach definitely will help the whole process and will assist the RM to maintain the team focused in talking only about risk.
