Suggestions for implementing geotechnical risk management

Abstract

Without doubt, geotechnical engineering is a key success factor for most construction projects. Currently, risk management gets more and more attention in these projects. Nevertheless, with geotechnical risk analysis becoming common practice, the routine application or implementation of geotechnical risk management still is an unexplored area. After numerous debates over the last years, about why applying geotechnical risk management in construction projects, a new major question emerges within the geotechnical community: How implementing geotechnical risk management effectively, efficiently, and persistently in construction projects? The Dutch Delft Cluster Research Programme Implementing Risk Management investigates the hurdles and conditions for successfully implementing risk management in organizations. First, by theory, data and investigator triangulation, these hurdles and conditions have been identified, analyzed, clustered and synthesized into seven key hurdles and ten key conditions for effectively applying geotechnical risk management. The result triggered another research question: Are these key hurdles and key conditions also appropriate for actually implementing geotechnical risk management within organizations? Therefore, the next research phase consisted of identifying, selecting, and combining innovation management variables and theories with those of risk management. The key hurdles and key conditions for geotechnical risk management have been synthesized and classified into two main implementation dimensions: (1) geotechnical risk management methodologies and (2) organizations routinely using geotechnical risk management. This paper presents the key conditions for implementing geotechnical risk management in organizations in a conceptual model, together with two main implementation suggestions. In conclusion, the research results demonstrate that the organizational dimension, which is usually entirely neglected, is of key importance for realizing the routine application of geotechnical risk management methodologies throughout all of the phases of construction projects. The synthesis of innovation management and risk management concepts and variables increases the chance for more effective, efficient, and persistent organizational implementation of geotechnical risk management in construction projects. This may dramatically strengthen the geotechnical role in, and contribution to, the successful completion of engineering and construction projects within our societies. Unlike most other papers, this paper focuses on implementing existing geotechnical risk management methodologies in organizations. Implementation is here simply defined as the routinized application of risk management during the entire design and construction process. Implementation thus differs highly from often incidentally application of risk analyses within construction projects. For instance, Halman (2008) addresses the importance of implementing risk management in the Dutch construction industry. The need for particularly implementing geotechnical risk management in organizations in the construction industry has been raised by Smith (2008). A workshop of the US GeoCouncil, in December 2006 with a group of fifty geoprofessionals, revealed that currently the main areas of attention in the construction industry are innovative contracting, safety, cost analyses, and research, development, and training. Attention to these trends should contribute to providing better, faster, and cheaper solutions to geotechnical problems in construction projects. Geotechnical risk management was considered as the best chance for meeting these demands in each of the trend areas (Smith, 2008). Obviously, geotechnical risk management should be routinely applied, and thus be well implemented within organizations, for materializing benefits. However, the author’s experience teaches that even when geotechnical professionals and their managers say that they are applying geotechnical risk management in engineering and construction projects, often they are not actually doing it in an explicit and well-structured way. Moreover, even if they do it in that explicit and well structured way, they often execute more of a risk analysis, rather than executing the full risk management cycle within each and every project phase. By conventional “hit and run” risk management of doing one or two analyses, the potentially large benefits of routinely applying geotechnical risk management remain hidden. This results in missed opportunities, for instance saving lives of construction workers by reducing unsafety, increasing profits by reducing failure costs, and speeding up the construction process by reducing delays. Similar to quality management (Imai, 1989), a cyclic approach with continuous attention to improving “little things” is required for effective geotechnical risk management (Van Staveren, 2006). This requires full implementation within (project) organizations. Therefore, after many debates over the last years, about why to apply geotechnical risk management in construction projects, now a new type of question emerges within the geotechnical community: how to implement geotechnical risk management effectively in construction projects? This how-question seems even more difficult to answer than the previous whyquestion. For instance, how to relate discipline-based geotechnical risk management to project risk management in construction projects? Therefore, this paper addresses a yet highly underestimated topic: How to realize a routine use of geotechnical risk management during planning, engineering, and construction of all sorts of buildings and infrastructure projects? To date, there appeared to be no literature covering this topic, despite its utmost relevance. Any scientific research and resulting practical guidance about how to implement risk management in general is very scarce. Concerning geotechnical risk management in particular, research and guidance is entirely lacking. Therefore, there seems to emerge a free market paradox of high knowledge demand with no knowledge supply. The implementation of geotechnical risk management is still an unexplored area of research. The practical research project Implementing Risk Management of the Dutch Delft Cluster Research Programme aims to answer the question of how to implement risk management in organizations in the construction industry. This research project is performed by involving researchers of the unit GeoEngineering of Deltares (formerly known as the Dutch National Institute for GeoEngineering, GeoDelft), the unit Innovation and Environment of TNO, the Technology, Policy, and Management faculty of the Delft University of Technology, and the Construction Management and Engineering research group of the University of Twente, Netherlands. The research will be completed by the end of the year 2009. However, recent research results for successfully implementing geotechnical risk management in organizations are readily available to be shared with the international geotechnical community. One of the innovative research approaches of the Implementing Risk Management project is considering the implementation of risk management in organizations a sort of innovation. If new to (part of) an organization, fostering the routine application of geotechnical risk management in (part of) the organization proved to have a lot in common with implementing innovations in organizations, such as geotechnical quality systems or software for geotechnical design. These organizations are either a temporary project organizations for realizing a construction project, or well-established firms. After this necessarily comprehensive introduction, this paper continues with presenting the research approach. Then, the research results about risk management, innovation management and their synthesis for implementing geotechnical risk management are presented. This generates the suggestions for implementing geotechnical risk management, the very core of this paper. It ends with the main research conclusions.