**9. Risk management meetings**

422 Risk Management – Current Issues and Challenges

**Figure 9.** Qualitative risk analysis

**Figure 10.** Quantitative risk analysis

critical risks identified with the Risk Registers.

The output of the qualitative risk analysis formed the basis or inputs for conducting the quantitative risk analysis. A set of cost ranges where developed for each project for matching the impact value selected. A model was built for running the Monte Carlo Simulation technique for obtaining the risk cost contingency for each project. Figure 10 shows the contingency values obtained per project. It is important to notice that instead of assigning a randomly selected contingency percent, these values are based directly on the

The cost contingency per project assessed with the quantitative analysis provides a substantial support for justifying the overall project uncertainty. It was a common practice It was not common at all at Caltrans to have risk management meetings for the PDT members and even for executives. What is a reality is that those meetings are critical for performing in depth thoughts about what can go wrong with the project. The most critical of the meetings is the planning meeting; which usually includes educating the RMT. Questions like: why a risk management exercise is needed? What could be the possible project risk contingency? What are the restrictions? What is the overall project uncertainty rate? Need answers for properly doing a risk management study.

The following aspects are quite relevant in order to keep an order and sense within the risk management planning meeting (Vose, 2008):


It was interesting to notice along the meetings that when the meetings were held, the invitees were already prepared just to talk about risk. In some cases, critical project issues were discovered thanks to the risk discussions.

The risk management meetings were properly planned, one for the identification, analysis and results. No meeting took more than two hours and instead of meeting minutes, the Risk Register was used as the deliverable for discussion and follow up.
