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Dad’s Birthday Party

By David Vose

Last week was my Dad’s 80th birthday. My parents live in the South of France, so it’s rare we all get together. Mum had been planning a surprise party for weeks. Dad was packed off in the morning with his siblings on an outing, then we exploded into action. Organization has never been my family’s strongest card, but with a lot of frenzied activity, mild panic and improvisation over 80 people were installed in the old village chapel at the allotted time ready to scream ‘Happy Birthday’ as he walked through the door.

He was an hour late.

That’s rather standard for my father, but it gave us a chance to practice our ‘Happy Birthday’ welcome and drink ourselves into the mood. My sister on lookout, peeking from the keyhole of the front doors, suddenly announced ‘He’s arrived’, then “He’s disappeared, I think he’s gone round the back”.

He had.

Being the oldest son and having a loud voice, I commanded everyone to turn around as he walked in through the back door. Not the usual back door, oh no, through the door leading to the bathrooms. ‘Un, deux, trois’ I shouted quickly and the much practiced ‘Happy Birthday’, or ‘Appy burzday’ depending on nationality, rang out and Mum was happy. The surprise was a great success.

Now, in hindsight, and based on years of my mother’s frustration, it was quite predictable that Dad would do the exact opposite of what everyone expected. It turned out he had his reasons (the car park in front was full) and we could have managed that if we’d thought about it. Some lessons to learn for his next birthday:

  • Despite plenty of similar past experience, we didn’t plan for the way my Dad would behave. He had a good reason (though nobody wanted to admit that). We didn’t think about leaving a space for his car, and we didn’t have anyone in charge of organizing parking;
  • We hadn’t a clue when he’d arrive. There were four in the car, but my sister only had the number for Uncle Anthony in her phone, which she’d left back at the house. The hour’s wait in the chapel involved a lot of discussion about how it might have been a good idea to have had a backup plan, and whether anyone would dare rush back to get the phone;
  • The day was saved by the quick thinking oldest son with management experience who was able to rally everyone together and instantly produce and execute a new plan.

Which brings me to the topic. Over the years, I have done a lot of project risk analysis work. Naively, I started out by adding uncertainty to enormous schedule models. It quickly became obvious that this was a huge waste of time for a number of reasons. A much better solution was to analyze the uncertainties in the project at a pretty high level, so we could focus on the big uncertainties and risks and how to manage them. Spreadsheets are actually quite ideal for this. For many projects, the biggest risks and uncertainties come from people (like my Dad). I don’t think there is enough emphasis generally placed on the relationship between the quality of a project’s team(s) and management, and the uncertainty in achieving a project’s goals (delivery time, cost, quality of finished deliverables). In project risk modeling, that comes down to using correlation between, for example, task durations much more often than is commonly practiced. ModelRisk has some tools for modeling correlation that are particularly applicable in this situation.

Project Risk Package

I have written a short explanation of why projects so often take longer than originally planned, and how risk analysis can help you produce more realistic estimates. The failure to have realistic estimates of completion time and cost can have truly dramatic repercussions, and have even occasionally resulted in the collapse of companies, so please do take the time to read this. I have also made a very simple project schedule and cost template Excel/ModelRisk model that you can try out. It has some neat features that allow you to take account of the quality of teams, let you add risks, and even factor in holidays. They can all be downloaded by clicking the link below.

I hope the paper convinces you that project risk analysis can be a valuable tool, and the model convinces you that the math is really rather easy. If you are interested in looking at the risks in your project, we offer training courses. These courses will teach you to build models, of course, but their main focus is on identifying risks and uncertainties, figuring out effective risk management strategies, and getting good estimates – because these are what make a project risk analysis genuinely useful.

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