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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.
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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