Project Management in the Oil and Gas Industry

8.4.2 Grouping the Risks
After defining all the events that may occur during project execution, affect 
the project objective, or increase the project time or cost, you then need to 
group the risks. In this stage, we need an applicable method to identify the 
risks. This method is called quantitative risk assessment. This method is the 
same as defining the key stage. All participants in the project should attend 
a meeting, in which the brain storming technique is used to predict events 
whose occurrence make a problem to the project target, cost, and time.
Grouping the risks will be more important for large projects than small 
ones. The general idea is that if it takes more than ten people to meet and 
deal with a group of risks, the meeting is too large and will be inefficient. As 
projects become larger, it is necessary to have a series of risk management 
meetings, whereas in a small project one meeting might do. To facilitate 
this, you can use techniques similar to the techniques that were used in the 
development of the work breakdown structure. In fact, the WBS itself can 
be used to organize meetings for risk management.
Risks should be assigned to the person who is most closely associated 
with where the risk will have its largest impact or to the person who has 
the most familiarity with the technology of the risk. A risk that takes place 
during the completion of a particular task and directly affects only that task 
should be a concern to the person responsible for that task. Of course, no 
task in a project is truly independent of all the others. So for more severe 
risks, a person in the organization above the person responsible for the 
task may be responsible for the risk.
Oftentimes, in projects where risk is of great concern, the project man-
ager creates the position of risk manager. This person is responsible for 
tracking all risks and maintaining the risk management plan. As projects 

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become larger or tolerance for risk is low, this approach becomes more 
necessary.
The responsible person who will mitigate and follow up this task should 
be defined clearly, and his or her name can be placed in Table 8.3.