The role of risk mitigation actions in engineering projects: An empirical investigation

IF 1.6 3区工程技术 Q4 ENGINEERING, INDUSTRIAL

Systems Engineering Pub Date : 2022-09-10 DOI:10.1002/sys.21639

A. Shafqat, J. Oehmen, T. Welo, G. Ringen

{"title":"The role of risk mitigation actions in engineering projects: An empirical investigation","authors":"A. Shafqat, J. Oehmen, T. Welo, G. Ringen","doi":"10.1002/sys.21639","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Engineering‐heavy new product development (NPD) projects face unplanned design iterations, which can cause failure in terms of missed targets for cost, schedule, quality, and customer satisfaction. These unplanned design iterations can be understood as the occurrence of a specific category of engineering project risks. As a result, companies employ structured actions to mitigate these risks in projects. However, even with such strategies in place, projects can still struggle to achieve their targets. This study aims to explore how companies employ risk mitigation actions to manage risks in engineering‐based NPD projects. To investigate this topic, a survey of employees in the aerospace and defense industries was conducted. We analyzed the responses using statistical methods. The results indicate that risk mitigation actions are used according to thematic clusters, in line with our findings from the literature. Furthermore, the selected mitigation measures show collective explanatory power for handling engineering project risks, suggesting that while some projects that employ mitigation actions may still fail, their use of such measures does still reduce the overall impact of risks. Interestingly, the results of the statistical analysis show no significant difference in the employment of risk mitigation actions in engineering‐based NPD projects, whether they employ waterfall or agile NPD methods, or a mixture of both. These results suggest that companies should consider all classes of risk mitigation actions to manage engineering project risks. On this basis, the wider contextualization of individual mitigating actions should be taken into account when planning risk mitigation for engineering‐based NPD projects.","PeriodicalId":54439,"journal":{"name":"Systems Engineering","volume":"25 1","pages":"584 - 608"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6000,"publicationDate":"2022-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Systems Engineering","FirstCategoryId":"5","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1002/sys.21639","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"ENGINEERING, INDUSTRIAL","Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Abstract

Engineering‐heavy new product development (NPD) projects face unplanned design iterations, which can cause failure in terms of missed targets for cost, schedule, quality, and customer satisfaction. These unplanned design iterations can be understood as the occurrence of a specific category of engineering project risks. As a result, companies employ structured actions to mitigate these risks in projects. However, even with such strategies in place, projects can still struggle to achieve their targets. This study aims to explore how companies employ risk mitigation actions to manage risks in engineering‐based NPD projects. To investigate this topic, a survey of employees in the aerospace and defense industries was conducted. We analyzed the responses using statistical methods. The results indicate that risk mitigation actions are used according to thematic clusters, in line with our findings from the literature. Furthermore, the selected mitigation measures show collective explanatory power for handling engineering project risks, suggesting that while some projects that employ mitigation actions may still fail, their use of such measures does still reduce the overall impact of risks. Interestingly, the results of the statistical analysis show no significant difference in the employment of risk mitigation actions in engineering‐based NPD projects, whether they employ waterfall or agile NPD methods, or a mixture of both. These results suggest that companies should consider all classes of risk mitigation actions to manage engineering project risks. On this basis, the wider contextualization of individual mitigating actions should be taken into account when planning risk mitigation for engineering‐based NPD projects.

查看原文本刊更多论文

风险缓解行动在工程项目中的作用:一项实证调查

工程量大的新产品开发（NPD）项目面临计划外的设计迭代，这可能会导致成本、进度、质量和客户满意度方面的失败。这些计划外的设计迭代可以理解为特定类别的工程项目风险的发生。因此，公司采用结构化的行动来减轻项目中的这些风险。然而，即使制定了这样的战略，项目仍可能难以实现其目标。本研究旨在探讨公司如何在基于工程的NPD项目中采用风险缓解措施来管理风险。为了调查这个话题，对航空航天和国防工业的员工进行了一项调查。我们使用统计方法分析了反应。结果表明，风险缓解行动是根据主题集群使用的，这与我们在文献中的发现一致。此外，所选择的缓解措施显示出处理工程项目风险的集体解释力，这表明尽管一些采取缓解措施的项目可能仍然失败，但它们对这些措施的使用仍然降低了风险的总体影响。有趣的是，统计分析结果显示，在基于工程的NPD项目中，无论采用瀑布法还是敏捷NPD方法，或者两者兼而有之，风险缓解措施的使用都没有显著差异。这些结果表明，公司应该考虑所有类别的风险缓解措施来管理工程项目风险。在此基础上，在规划基于工程的NPD项目的风险缓解时，应考虑到个人缓解行动的更广泛背景。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

求助全文

约1分钟内获得全文求助全文

来源期刊

Systems Engineering 工程技术-工程：工业

CiteScore

5.10

自引率

20.00%

发文量

审稿时长

6 months

期刊介绍： Systems Engineering is a discipline whose responsibility it is to create and operate technologically enabled systems that satisfy stakeholder needs throughout their life cycle. Systems engineers reduce ambiguity by clearly defining stakeholder needs and customer requirements, they focus creativity by developing a system’s architecture and design and they manage the system’s complexity over time. Considerations taken into account by systems engineers include, among others, quality, cost and schedule, risk and opportunity under uncertainty, manufacturing and realization, performance and safety during operations, training and support, as well as disposal and recycling at the end of life. The journal welcomes original submissions in the field of Systems Engineering as defined above, but also encourages contributions that take an even broader perspective including the design and operation of systems-of-systems, the application of Systems Engineering to enterprises and complex socio-technical systems, the identification, selection and development of systems engineers as well as the evolution of systems and systems-of-systems over their entire lifecycle. Systems Engineering integrates all the disciplines and specialty groups into a coordinated team effort forming a structured development process that proceeds from concept to realization to operation. Increasingly important topics in Systems Engineering include the role of executable languages and models of systems, the concurrent use of physical and virtual prototyping, as well as the deployment of agile processes. Systems Engineering considers both the business and the technical needs of all stakeholders with the goal of providing a quality product that meets the user needs. Systems Engineering may be applied not only to products and services in the private sector but also to public infrastructures and socio-technical systems whose precise boundaries are often challenging to define.