Dorota Kuchta

In the paper a new approach to research projects planning and management is proposed. It is substantially different from the traditional methods and resembles more the agile methods used in IT projects. It takes into account the much more greater dimension of uncertainty inherent to research projects as compared with other types of projects. It allows a project to be broken if the analysis shows that the benefit/cost relation does no longer justify the project continuation. The focus of the method lies on an generalized tasks description, consisting of a comprehensive list of undetermined, unknown or uncertain task attributes and task dependencies, with an explanation clarifying the nature or the cause of the lack of information/uncertainty. The description should be updated in the course of the project. The proposed approach is applied to a real world research project where a lot of changes were necessary and traditional project management methods proved to be inefficient.

Background. In projects of electrical switchboard delivery we can identify many risks which are usually quite severe in their consequences, because these projects are high-budget projects. Our studies indicate that there are no formalised risk management procedures in many Polish companies that realise such projects.

Research aims. Therefore we propose using a traditional risk management procedure adapted for projects of electrical switchboard delivery what was verified on the example of a selected company.

Methodology. We use the following research methods: analysis of the documentation relating to completed projects of electrical switchboard delivery, interviews with project managers, and literature studies.

Key findings. We obtained the following results: Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), list of identified project risks, list of risk responses, computer tool for managing identified risks in projects of electrical switchboard delivery. Based on the completed studies we can state that risk management is an important element of electrical switchboard delivery and should not be ignored in companies that realise such projects.