Forecasting potential project risks through leading indicators to project outcome

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Date

2007-09-17

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Publisher

Texas A&M University

Abstract

During project execution, the status of the project is periodically evaluated, using traditional methods or standard practices. However, these traditional methods or standard practices may not adequately identify certain issues, such as lack of sufficient identification of warning signs that predict potential project failure. Current methods may lack the ability to provide real time indications of emerging problems that impact project outcomes in a timely manner. To address this problem, the Construction Industry Institute (CII) formed a research team to develop a new tool that can forecast the potential risk of not meeting specific project outcomes based on assessing leading indicators. Thus, the leading indicators were identified and then the new tool was developed and validated. A screening process was conducted through industry surveys after identifying potential leading indicators. Each time, industry professionals were asked to evaluate the negative impact of leading indicators on project outcomes that were identified to measure the impact of leading indicators on project health. Through this process, forty-three leading indicators were acquired finally. Using descriptive statistics, the amount of negative impact of each leading indicator on project outcomes was identified after the analysis of the survey results. Based on these impacts, the tool development was initiated. The tool concept is that no indication of problems based on assessing leading indicators results in the tool output score high. To comply with this concept, specific weights were assigned to each leading indicator to reflect the impact on each project outcome. By this procedure, the Project Health Indicator (PHI) tool was developed. The validation process of the PHI tool was conducted using completed projects and finally negative correlation was observed between project outcomes and health scores generated by the PHI tool.

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Keywords

Project Risk, Forecasting, Tool, Leading Indicator

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