Risk Management: Lessons from Six Continents

Abstract

Globally, the need to construct new pipelines is increasing dramatically, both on shore and off shore. So too are the risks that are faced in attempting to meet project and stakeholder goals. Not meeting such goals has even greater consequences as a result. Project execution from potential identification of its need through execution and in-service use to decommissioning requires project management processes and tools at all stages of this timeline. Today, global project management standards are being developed, promulgated, taught, and applied. The reason is obvious. Project management is an essential function that is the single greatest means of assuring that a project is successful in meeting all objectives from cost to functionality. It also is the single greatest means of assuring that a party with a role in the project execution (developer, owner-employer, engineer-constructor, contractor-subcontractor, vendor, operator-user, etc.) achieves its commercial, professional, and related goals. Project management is the most widely found cause for failure to meet project objectives and goals. Within today’s project management bodies of knowledge, risk management techniques are evolving as a key tool to maximize achievement of goals, yet application of risk management in pipeline projects is not focused on a broad spectrum of the risks being experienced throughout the project. Ultimately, risk management application provides the ability to identify risks, determine characteristics of risk emergence, allow measurement through control systems, and apply enhanced project management methods for improved achievement of project and stakeholder goals throughout the life of a pipeline project. Risk management is essential to recognize and develop input to meet the different needs for the project and respective stakeholders’ success throughout the seasons of a pipeline project’s life—a project’s spring season (from the identification of a possible need that may become a project to its financing/funding), a project’s summer season (project execution), a project’s fall season (project use), and a project’s winter season (sustainable recycling). This paper develops the types of risks for eight categories of risk factors being experienced, tools being used, application options and successes, and the contexts needed for success. The basis for these approaches is the global project management experience of the writer over the last three decades on six continents (on-shore and off-shore), including oil and gas, water, and wastewater.