The Importance and Use of Risk Management in Various Stages of Construction Projects Life Cycle ( PLC )

Risk management is a step to make construction projects more efficient and practical such that uncertainties should be identified before occurring and changing into crisis and a balance should be made between threats and opportunities. Accordingly, construction industry is one of the most important and job creating industries in all countries. Compared to other economic-industrial sectors, construction management is highly influenced by the perception and employment of risk management concept. Additionally, there are abundant risks in such activities since Construction projects activities are very complex and various. Hence, it seems necessary to evaluate the proper use of risk management in various stages of Construction projects life cycle. In this regard, the present study attempts to describe Construction projects life cycle step by step and analyze the way of using risk management from designing stage to reviewing and supporting stage. The final objective of the study is to describe the process of using project management and its tools to create an optimal status in terms of risk and return balance in order to reach main objectives in construction projects.


Introduction
The success of a construction project is evaluated based on the results obtained based on project objectives in the form of determined time, cost and quality.Also, achieving desirable results depends on the way of managing risks the project face with.Most of construction projects managers start to work only with a vague view of project objectives and priorities.Each of risk management processes involves applying analysis, planning, control, and managerial techniques employment that require investment (Akintoye et al., 1997).Furthermore, to execute this process in organizations, necessary infrastructures such as technical, backup and computer infrastructures as well as information banks and processes should be provided.Awareness and perception about the importance of construction projects management should be clarified in project management decision makings.The natural structure of these decisions is construction projects life cycle (Tah et al., 2000).
Risk plays a significant role in success or failure of various industries, particularly construction.As a result of influencing cost, efficiency and time of project execution, risk appears as opportunity and threat.In construction projects, risk factors include climatic change, cultural differences, instability, the possibility of change in state's policies, and economic-financial problems (Zavadskas et al., 2009).Big construction projects involve many risk factors that influence project results; therefore, it should be properly managed.Project management association defined "risk" as uncertain event or conditions with positive or negative effects on project objectives if occurs.Project management association also defines risk management as the systematic process of identifying, analyzing, and controlling project risks to maximize positive results and minimize negative results (PMBOK, 2004).Even with the use of risk management tools in development projects can be used to optimize costs (Eskandari & Korouzhdeh, 2016).
The schematic of project life cycle is necessary to provide a framework to predict uncertainties resources untimely occurred and be informed about the changing time of risk management in project life cycle.management process in a project causes many problems.At the beginning of execution stage, with respect to the signed contracts, contractors in charge of supplying equipment's and execution are determined and the responsibility pertained to each project are also specified.Changing in risk management, compared to the stage of design, is very difficult and ineffective and it may create considerable additional cost in the project.

Risk Management Process at the Stage of Designing Construction Projects
The stage of designing is the best time of stating risk management process in construction projects and construction industry.It is due to the fact that in this stage, the macro objectives of the project, design of the project, and its time and cost are determined at strategic level and the time of investigating its related risks is at detailed levels.In this stage of life cycle, identifying all uncertainty resources and reactions related to life cycle steps, organizing and determining their relations, determining managerial and financial responsibilities related with each of risks, and their qualitative and quantitative analyses are performed (Lyons et al., 2004).In fact, at the end of designing stage, all project risks and their individual and combinational effects on the project are determined and prioritized.After the stage of designing, risk management process will control the obtained results, and apply reactions determined in considered step, reviewing identification, organization and analyses, if necessary.If risk management is started after the stage of designing, all the next stages of risk management will be executed in the project.The only difference between them is in applicable reactions imitation due to passing time of the project, spending cost and time to compensate unpredicted risk occurrence or the impossibility of compensating works done in the project.In designing stage, risk management process is as following:

The Definition of Project: the First Step of Risk Management in Construction Projects Design Stage
Independent from the fat that risk management process starts in which steps of construction projects life cycle, all project beneficiaries and their expectations as well as macro objectives of project should be identified through available documents and precise study of the project history.Exactly identifying beneficiaries and objectives of project can be highly effective in the effectiveness of risk management process and probable selective reactions to cope with various risks in project.In other words, not identifying beneficiaries and macro objectives of project can change them into important uncertainties in the process of project execution.

Identifying beneficiary factors in project:
It is necessary to have a wide and safe view of all beneficiary factors of project and deep view to identify the expectations of each of them can considerably influence affect the project.Beneficiary factors are discussed in two preliminary and secondary classes.Preliminary beneficiary factors include individuals or organizations related to project through legal contracts.This class is associated with employer, investors, suppliers, work groups, customers, project management team, organizations partners.They can directly influence the project.This class is superior in terms of decision making and all their opinions and commands should be confirmed.The secondary beneficiary factors include individuals or organizations that are indirectly influenced by project effects.This class is legally involved in the project and its activities and they are not necessary to continue project life.This class includes municipalities, citizens, environments' advocate, different organizations, publications, media, etc.These can indirectly influence the project execution and enter very important uncertainty resources in the project.
Beneficiary factors of the project can create risk cases influencing project execution.Basic changes in the project design require adopting all key members including preliminary beneficiary factors of the project.If preliminary beneficiary factors regarding project changes are not justified, the process of management decision making regarding this change in the design can be changed into crisis management instead of risk management.In some projects, beneficiary factors influence the project in larger scale.For example, different technical needs, different comments regarding scheduling and budget design, different contractual systems among factors and contractors can highly influence the project execution and change the path of the project sometimes.If separate objectives of each of beneficiary factors of the project are met in the project, it is impossible to determine macro objectives of the project to cover all partial objectives.To manage uncertainty resources and risks related to beneficiary factors, it is highly important to identify all these factors, their reactions in different steps of life cycle and during the project execution and the effect of these reactions on the project execution.In this regard, the reactions related to the expectations of each of beneficiary factors with the parties' agreement should be determined before the end of designing to prevent problems in the next steps and particularly execution.

Identifying weighting macro objectives of project:
Identifying the project objectives is highly important for the project.This fact will be also important in terms of risk analyses structure formation through the project objectives structure.To actualize this fact, it is needed to identify the nature of the project objectives, their important related items, the way of measuring them, and the relation between various objectives of the project (Pica & Massimo, 2016).For instance, project managers should consider the priorities related to cost, time and quality with respect to their relations and mutual effects of these three executive criteria.If this act is not actualized, each of project team members may individually adopt improper decisions regarding various projects, leading to the deception and lack of concentration of the project organization.Given to the priorities and uncertainties resources, different project objectives and their related efforts can be explicitly recorded in an analytical structure and used in the next risk management stages in the future steps.

The Main Focus on Risk Management in Construction Projects
This stage includes the following two main processes: 1. Determining risk management range of the project involves responding to some questions regarding the cause and advantages of risk management execution, uncertainties resources related to the project at strategic level that can lead to providing a precise and detailed structure of project risk management.2. Providing risk management process design involves appropriate structure regarding detailed analyses levels, models, software, and other resources in risk management process in certain time and finally, providing executive program of risk management to execute it.Directly, the output of this stage is related to the way of executing risk management that include project organization structure, risk management team, uncertainties structure of the projects at macro level and risk analysis model.

Identifying Risks in Construction Projects
Identifying uncertainty resources of the project in all life cycle steps and its related probable reactions as well as identifying uncertainty resources chain and subsequent reactions imposed on the project due to applying preliminary reactions are widely performed in this step.The important thing is to identify all these cases by considering their relations and managing them.Given that available strategic documents about previous steps, all risks related to the project beneficiary factors, the project design, the project scheduling, the project resources, contractual structure, and the project allocations, execution, setting up, submitting and backing up the identified project are prioritized based on their level of effect on the project.Also, the place of investigating and managing of them is specified with respect to reactions selected regarding their management.To organize the important relations between various identified uncertainty resources and the probable mutual effects between the reactions selected for each of them are extracted.Lack of organizing uncertainty resources, on the other hand, causes that the potential opportunities in the project cannot be changed into the advantage and benefit.In organizing, by relating uncertainty resources and determining the sequences and mutual effects of each of the resources with the preliminary reactions or resources chain and the subsequent reactions, it should be ensured to consider all risk factors in the project (Hakim, Amin & Hakin, 2005).This action can be led to identifying new uncertainty resources or alternative reactions.Also, in addition to creating the capability of detecting risks in each step of the cycle, the mentioned action is highly important for qualitative and quantitative analyses.

Determining Managerial and Financial Responsibility of Risks in Construction Projects
This part of the process occurred in designing step allocates risk managerial and financial responsibilities.One of the main causes is to not identifying some uncertainty resources in the early steps of the project life cycle that appear when entering into each step.Assigning managerial and financial responsibilities to individuals involved in the project or external organizations, it can be ensured that in charge mangers identify newly advent resources and control them by determining the relation between various cases before the incidence of risks and damage.Moreover, this responsibility allocation causes that all financial or time losses due to risks occurrence are up to the determined responsible in case of inability in managing and controlling the project risks.
This part is so important that it can be viewed as a separate project since the cases related to the project responsibilities, particularly in projects with heavy investments are very complex and unclear responsibilities at the beginning of the work makes it difficult to determine the related responsible in case of any problem and damage.Using the result obtained from this stage, contractual strategy of the project and the way of allocating works to consultants, contractors, design management services, employer, various beneficiary factors, and the war of assigning risk can be specified.In addition, all the required contractual requirements will be specified in each sector with respect to the identified risks.In fact, the newt two steps of planning and allocation using the results obtained from risk management are performed at the end of designing step.

Quantitatively Analysis to Estimate Risk in Construction Project
Identifying all risks with their prioritization in terms of their effect on the project, their relations and determining only allocated to interpret adopted effective decisions from the beginning of the project life cycle since decision about the steps has been previously made and this step determine the success or failure of the project.
One of the most important items of risk management n submission step is to manage beneficiary factors expectations.In this step, different beneficiary factors may present new expectations or their expectations may not be properly identified.Of course, this work, in case of the necessity of basic changes in design or execution, can involve considerable heavy costs for construction projects.

Risk Management Process in Review and Backup Stage in Construction Projects
The step of review includes auditing construction projects documentation.This step is mainly performed for large and national construction projects after its submission.If risk management process is not properly performed, effective review of the project cannot be actualized.Of course, this step has no effect on the execution process; it is only performed to investigate risk management process performance in the project to obtain experience for future projects.
Backup step is the last step of project life cycle that includes project control work breakdown structure from the moment of setting up to the end of its life.The items related to project control work breakdown structure can derive from ideal design steps.The items related to the credit, maintainability and accessibility of project control work breakdown structure can be determined in design step; therefore, these items may be related to planning, allocation, and execution or steps.All these items in previous steps of project life cycle are regarded as uncertainty resources.These items can be managed in backup step as critical items in line with beneficiary factors expectation management.

Conclusion
Successful execution of effective risk management requires basic attention to various uncertainty resources and risks in different steps of project life cycle.It is very essential to know the best time of starting risk management; to know in which step risk management should be started, and to know what damages can be caused due to untimely start of this process.In the present work, it has been attempted to analyze the efforts related to risk management process in different steps of construction projects life cycle and specify the place of risk management process in construction projects life cycle.According to the research findings, it can be concluded that the following items should be executed for the success of each construction project: • Creating an integrative mechanism to risk management process and project life cycle • Analyzing different examples of various risks in various steps of project life cycle • Considering effective factors in risk management in each step of life cycle and focusing on selected reactions regarding each of uncertainty resources related to life cycle steps • Determining beneficiary factors and macro objectives of project as one of the most important factor in project execution.Not considering them in risk management process can appear as a basic uncertainty resource in various stages of project.
To execute risk management process, establishing relation between risk management process and various steps of project lie