Exploring opportunities in risks of residential construction projects

Construction industry is known for its high risks due to its complexity and vulnerability to external conditions, such as political, weather, etc., as well as project related risk factors. Even though risks may have positive or negative effects, risks have been traditionally viewed as negative aspects that should be minimized or avoided. Thus, opportunities that are actually exist and can be explored in some risks are overlooked. The current risk management process need to be made more robust and efficient to capture the possible ways of exploiting available opportunities in the risks. This research examined risk factors associated with residential projects in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana states of India from which opportunities can be extracted and further analyzed to identify the risk (opportunity) factors that have high impact on maximizing project value, so that the current risk and opportunity management processes can be made more robust and efficient. Questionnaire survey was conducted to assess the perceptions of project managers or chief engineers of contractor firms on the risk factors that can be transformed into opportunities in the project execution. From the result, it is found out that even though risks are considered holistically, and the perceived importance is high, the actual implementation is not effective because of the traditional threat-oriented view of the risks. In general, the probability of risks in generating opportunity is not considered to be high. However, a few risk factors could generate high benefit to the project. Eleven important opportunity factors out of 40 factors were identified based on the scores of likelihood and impact. These 11 factors were explored in depth by interviewing experts to gain understanding on the influencing aspects that enable the generation of opportunities from the risk factors and the possible benefits of each opportunity factor. © 2018 The Authors. Published by Diamond Congress Ltd. Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the Creative Construction Conference 2018.