|
Network
of Excellence
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CARiMan
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The
Internet Portal for Computer Aided Risk Management
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Responsible:
PTA & EURO
Assistance:
ICS, EIAF,
Panto, NOM,
PRO, RoSo,
SGS, AGH,
TGS, DET,
all partners
The JPA of quality and risk
management in EU projects aims at identifying, applying, and spreading best
practices on EU project risk management. CARiMan will provide the test-bed for
both the identification and the application of best practices.
A project risk can be
defined as any factor that may potentially interfere with the successful
implementation and completion of a project. Risk management recognizes that a
problem might always occur. Actually, risks are inherently involved when
scheduling resources. By anticipating potential problems in advance, the project
management team can take corrective actions.
The concept of Risk
Management, as it will be applied in this JPA, includes the processes concerned
with identifying, analysing, and responding to project risk. The different
components of risk management are the following:
·
Risk Identification - determining which risks are likely to affect the
project and documenting the characteristics of each. This JPA will not try to
identify all possible risks that might affect a project, but focus on those
likely to affect a project’s success. All members of CARiMan can identify
risk, but the Management Board will have the overall responsibility.
·
Risk Quantification - evaluating risks and risk interactions to assess the
range of possible project outcomes. Risks will be quantified and documented so
that contingency measures can be taken to mitigate their effects. Risks to both
the internal and external aspects will be tracked.
·
Risk Response Development - defining corrective actions and contingency plans to
respond to threats. Contingency plans are developed as a result of a risk being
identified and quantified. CARiMan will develop contingency plans for the top
five risks associated with a project.
·
Risk Response Control - responding to changes in risk over the course of the
project. Risk identification, management, and resolution will continue
throughout the life of CARiMan. New risks are normally developed as a project
matures and external and internal situations change. Old risks may go away or
decrease in likelihood.
These components interact
with each other and may involve effort from one or more individuals or groups of
individuals based on the needs of the project. The Risk Management Plan
documents the procedures used to manage risk. In addition to documenting the
results of the risk identification and analysis phases, it will also state who
is responsible for managing various areas of risk, how risks will be tracked
throughout the life cycle, how contingency plans will be implemented, and how
project resources will be allocated to handle risk.
There are various areas that
can affect an EU project, including:
·
The technology used in the
project.
·
The environment in which the
project is executed.
·
Relationships between team
members.
·
How well the project fits
the culture of the participants.
·
How great a change will
result from the project.
In this respect, the EC JPA will support the project management of large common
research and networking projects, using tools for risk and quality controlling.
The JPA will use the CARiMan Network of Excellence as a test bed for the
conceptualisation, development, implementation, testing and evaluation of a
knowledge-based quality and risk management platform. Through networking
activities, the validation of the project management tool will be assured and
continuous improvement will be possible. Consequently, this JPA will be an
example within the CARiMan Network for its own project management and control.
Four main aspects have to be taken into account to achieve the
technological objectives:
-
Ontology creation. The ontology for any given domain/participating JPA is required and
must be created. This is especially important for projects crossing the borders
of research disciplines and fields. In order not to overload the development
side of the objective, in a first step a state of the art analysis will be
performed in order to find existing ontologies for a given domain (Risk
Management) and to adopt and/or to personalise one Ontology Server and Reasoning
Engine
-
Knowledge sharing. The system will support knowledge sharing based on textual documents.
The supported formats will cover most popular ones as HTML, XML, PDF, RTF and
DOC. Authorized persons (authors) will be able to create, modify and remove
documents from the system – this actions will be supported with a version
controlling module. Authors will be able to set the level of accessibility of
the document (public, confidential etc.) or explicitly define the group of
persons that are allowed to see the document content. Moreover, the system will
support multi-author documents. Access to the documents will be realized through
the sophisticated search engine. It will be also provide the possibility to look
through hierarchically collected documents according to dynamically defined
conditions (e.g. Authors, WP, task, status).
-
Project execution control. The system will be able to control progress and current state of all
task, deliverables and WPs in the project. It will give the clear view of what
each partner has done, what is currently working on. It will also control all
the deadlines (deliverables, WPs) and especially send reminders to the partners
and notifications to the project leaders. The project execution control
subsystem will be tied to the knowledge sharing subsystem - the documents shared
by the partners as knowledge-sharing documents will be tailed to specific tasks
and WPs of the project. Partner and project requirements (deliverables,
milestones, finance etc) will be set in the system through the series of the
forms on the project set-up
Project documentation creation. This
module will support the generation of structured document formats and project
management lists, tables and charts (e.g. List of Activities, Gantt charts, Pert
diagrams). These reports will be generated based on the data obtained through
the series of the forms on the project set-up. This subsystem will also support
verification and scoring of new projects and project tasks in the following
criteria: formal requirements, management structure and others build upon the
common validation interface.