Risk Management in Practice: The case of Eiffel Tower
Hello to everyone. I was reading yesterday night the PM Network magazine of PMI (July 2015) and I spotted a very interesting article about a project adding wind turbines in the Eiffel Tower. You can read the article below and you can spot that the UGE company who runt the project applied all the PMI risk management theory in practice:
Article about Eiffel Tower project
The scope of the project was to add the below pictured turbines to the Eiffel Tower as a part of a greater green initiative of the French government but the effort had a lot of constrains mentioned in the project charter such as:
a. The towers iconic figure must stay intact.
b. The tourist visiting must not be obscured.
c. No cranes will be used for lifting the turbines because it could damage the 126 years old tower.
For a period of 10 months the project team applied all the tools and techniques of Risk Management that are mentioned in the chapter 11 of PMBOK in order to deliver the project on time, on cost and in full scope. Also they manage to achieve, through proper Risk Management, a 100% integration of all the knowledge areas of Project Management as you can read at the article. All the solutions to the project constrains and during the executions were dealt with a proactive Risk Management approach during the Identify Risk process so the project team has identify early all the opportunities and threats.
For example the project team identified the opportunity that specialized local technical teams were available at Paris that had a lot of experience from the maintenance of the tower so hiring them as SMEs would save time and prevent time creep and accidents.
One of the threats that was identified and dealt successfully was that because all the work had to be done during the night and after the closure of the tower, this night work was obviously more expensive and time consuming. So the risk team worked smoothly with the cost and schedule teams in order to built a realistic cost and time management plants with the proper contingency reserves in order not to have time delays and cost overruns.
The project manager, Mr Gromadzki from UGE, said at the end of the article that “At the end the team delivered everything the stakeholders required while staying within project constrains. The project execution happened exactly how it was planned!!!”
Enjoy reading the article and for more information about the specific project see the below links:
- http://www.ugei.com/content/eiffel-tower
- http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/2/8128587/eiffel-tower-wind-turbines-photo-essay
For the Greek readers, you can find information about our “Risk Management” seminars for 2016 in Thessaloniki and Athens at:
- at.fourtounas@gmail.com ή
+306946003220 - http://www.humanasset.gr ή http://www.humanasset.com
- Θεσσαλονίκη: 19-20 Μαρτίου 2016 (α΄ μέρος) & 01-02-03 Απριλίου 2016 (β΄μέρος): Newsletter for Risk Management Preparation Seminar Μάρτιος 2016
- Αθήνα 09-10 (α΄ μέρος) & 22-23-24 Απριλίου 2016 (β΄ μέρος): Newsletter for Risk Management Preparation Seminar Απρίλιος 2016
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