Introduction

During the early "conceptual" phase of a project life cycle considering for instance a competitive bidding process when a request for bidding has been received by an engineering and contracting company and the decision to bid has been made the main objective of the proposal manager is to achieve an effective trade-off between the bid competitive value on the side of the client expectations and the project baseline in terms of time/cost/performance constraints on the side of the utilization of the internal resources. Since the project's final performance depends primarily on project risk analysis and management, a "risk-driven approach" to project management appears to be necessary, particularly during the early phase when only scarce information is available and contractual obligations are to be established. In this context, both "internal" risk (e.g., probability of cost overrun) and "external" risk (e.g., probability of winning) must be taken into account.

The chapter presents the PRIMA (Project RIsk MAnagement The European Commission Information Society Technologies [IST] Community Research Project Number 1999-10193) research project aimed at implementing a risk-driven approach to project management through the development of a risk management corporate memory (RMCM) and a decision support system (DDS), allowing for collecting, storing, sharing, and using company knowledge both in terms of data records and expert knowledge in order to improve the company capability...