Evaluating the effectiveness of task overlapping as a risk response strategy in engineering projects

Abstract

In the last two decades, the failure of multiple engineering projects has highlighted the importance of adopting risk management practices. While risk identification and risk assessment have been widely studied in the literature, only few authors have proposed formal tools for helping project managers to evaluate the effectiveness of their risk response plan. While some risk response measures might be easily validated, overlapping, a commonly used mitigation measure in engineering projects is difficult to evaluate because of the complex interactions between activities and resources. This paper proposes an evaluation model to measure the effectiveness of overlapping strategy as a risk response in terms of additional cost and total maximum time reduction. Results based on a large set of generated projects highlight the importance of three factors in the effectiveness of an overlapping strategy: the number of opportunities of overlapping, the maximum overlapping amount allowed, and the level of resource constraints.