Planning Planet members are invited to a free AIPM Project Controls SIG  (PC-SIG) meeting to be held at The Water Rat Hotel, 256 Moray Street, South Melbourne VIC, 3205: http://www.thewaterrathotel.com.au/

Date: Wednesday 20 November 2013,  Start 5.30 pm – Start (note earlier start time) Finish 7.00 pm -  There is no catering for the forum but interested participants are invited to pre and  post- forum drinks at the bar (after all it is a pub!!).

The agenda for the meeting is:

·         17:30 Welcome to the AIPM SIG COP

·         17:35 AIPM News - John Williams  

·         17:40 Project Controls Developments - Pat Weaver

·         17:45 Presentation "Making Sense of Schedule Risk Analysis" - Tony Welsh

·         18:45 Wrap up

·         18:50 Close (after-meeting drinks/ dinner option)

The main presenter is Tony Welsh, President, Barbecana Inc. http://www.barbecana.com

Tony was one of the founders of Welcom (producer of Open Plan and Cobra) back in 1983.  He sold the company to Deltek in 2006 and has recently started a new company, Barbecana.

Tony grew up in South East London and holds degrees in physics from Oxford University and in operations research from the London School of Economics. His career began at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) under the direction of John Lawrence, a leading light in operations research (O.R.) and editor of the British O.R. Society journal. His work focused on sales forecasting, media scheduling, and measuring the affects of advertising.

Since 1980, Tony has been involved exclusively with project management software, for most of that time at the company he co-founded, Welcom. During that time he has been personally responsible for, among other things, the development of no less than four schedule risk analysis systems.

His paper will start with a brief discussion of the nature of uncertainty and how we measure it, the validity of subjective estimates, and why schedule uncertainty is different and more complex than cost uncertainty.  This will include an explanation of the phenomenon of merge bias.

It will go on to explain how Monte Carlo simulation works and why it is the only valid way to deal with schedule uncertainty.  Reference will be made specifically to uncertainty relating to task durations, resource costs, and project calendars.

The main part of the paper will deal with how to determine the input data, including correlations, and how to interpret the results, including estimated frequency function, cumulative frequency function, and percentile points. 

The paper will conclude with a discussion of sensitivity analysis, its value, and the difficulty of doing it properly.

This event is a rare opportunity for Australian based project controls professionals in and around Melbourne to engage with one of the founders of the project controls profession, still active in developing and advancing our skills and knowledge.

To help manage numbers you are asked to register with AIPM at?  http://www.aipm.com.au/iMIS/Events/Event_Display.aspx?EventKey=VI131120&zbrandid=2139&zidType=CH&zid=5168408&zsubscriberId=505907810&zbdom=http://aipm.informz.net  (the event is free).  But as long as you don’t mind the risk of standing, pre-registration is not essential.

As the event sponsor, my hope is we have a really good turnout for the event and look forward to seeing you at The Water Rat – there’s plenty of street parking and the pub is on the #1 tram route.