Assessment of Home-Based Nigerian Engineers on Risk Management Approach during Project Implementation

The objectives of this paper are to identify possible gaps in identification, evaluation, analysis, implementation and effectiveness of risk management approaches among home-based consulting Engineers in Nigeria vis-à-vis the implementation of such practices. Structured Questionnaire method was adopted as the survey instrument to collect data centred on issues on the subject matters. Out of 80 questionnaires distributed, 61 were returned and 6 of the returned responses rendered invalid leaving 55 valid questionnaires. The Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and Correlation methods were adopted for statistical analysis with respect to which four hypotheses based on the subject matter were formulated and evaluated using the F-and Correlation statistics. The first premised on risk identification resulted in comparative F-statistics of F_cal = 0.057592 < F_crit = 2.866081, the second on risk evaluation yielded F_cal = 0.194683 < F_crit = 2.866081 while the third based on risk management implementation resulted in F_cal = 0.093474 < F_crit = 2.866081. The results of the first three hypothesis indicted the home-based Consulting Engineers of not identifying, analysing/evaluating and implementing risk management approaches in project execution respectively. The fourth hypothesis premised on correlation between management approach and policy implementation yielded a correlation statistics of 0.501642 establishing a positive correlation between the two among the home-based Consulting Engineers. The study thus establishes risk management practices as key to successful project management and its neglect as major causal factor for project failures in Nigeria.

Keywords
Risk; Uncertainty; Risk Management; Engineering Consultants; Project Managers