A Framework for Project Safety Management by Applying Social Network Analysis

Projects need a network of various resources such as human, equipment and materialwhich should be used together to achieve some goals. Today, in order to better manage this network, theidea of applying social network analysis (SNA) has been introduced in the project management. Sincesafety issues cause important challenges in projects, in this paper, the SNA is applied to promote theproject’s safety level. The main idea of this research is to find the most influential person who has thehigh potential for creating accidents. Specifically, to solve this problem, the authors address three mainsubjects: firstly, to identify the existing links in the social network of projects according to differentcauses of accidents, secondly to analyze the network by applying the SNA and the third, to presentsome strategies to manage the most influential persons based on the results of the SNA. By applying theproposed framework with six steps, firstly the accidents can be prioritized based on their density andsecondly, the most influential person can be identified based on centrality. To implement the proposedframework, a case study has been reviewed and the results showed that the falling from height and HSEman are the most important accident and the most influential person, respectively.