Organizing Project Actors for Collective Decision-Making about Interdependent Risks

Abstract

The way project actors are organized is crucial in determining how they will be able to collectively cope with nontrivial complex problems and risks. Current project organizations are generally based on single-criterion decomposition, whether product, process, or organization based. The proposed approach forms complementary clusters of actors based on the interdependencies between the risks they manage. More precisely, distinction has been made between the interdependencies connecting two risks that are owned by different actors and those owned by the same actor. We argue that interdependency between two risks managed by the same actor is less dangerous, meaning that clustering algorithm is tailored to distinguish mono- and biactor risk interdependencies. The complementary structure offered by interdependency-based clustering tends to put together strongly interconnected actors, albeit they were often initially not grouped together. It increases the likelihood of a better communication, coordination, and collective decision-making in complex situations. Some risks remain out of proposed clusters and are declared transverse, which means that their owners act as information hubs and are not involved in a single cluster. An industrial application is presented with operational results and perspectives for further work are drawn from it.