Risk Breakdown Structure for Construction Projects on Existing Buildings

Governments and private investors are increasingly becoming aware of the marketing power and the importance of seismic safety of old cores of their cities. Hereby the interest in preserving the original look and often even the original, but improved construction of the buildings becomes imperative and a demanding task for engineers and project managers. The main goal of project management is controlling the outcome of a project through control of elements like quality of the final product, costs and time, whereas practice shows that these types of projects very often overrun cost and time limits. Therefore these are the main research questions: Can construction projects on strengthening and preserving existing buildings be successfully governed with existing risk management tools? If not, how can we improve the existing risk management tools?In this paper development of a new risk breakdown structure for construction projects on existing and historical buildings is presented. The risk breakdown structure is developed based on previous project experiences and in collaboration with a series of experts.