Hi,

Take a look at Risk Reasoning Ltd and their Risk Aid software.

looks good.

It will be demo’d on 13 May in Southampton UK

Details downloadable from www.microplanning.co.uk

John

Hi All,

I have used most types of Risk Analysis tools, and the input data is very important. However with MS Project, I decided just to model Risk not Uncertainty.

Regards
Robyn

Nozul
Thank you very much indeed for that information.
I have downloaded the two files.
It will make some interesting reading
Thanks again
DS

Norzul and Ali
Pertmaster interfaces very easily with all Primavera planning software applications, including their Enterprise products (Previously known as P3e and TeamPlay). In fact, in the latest version of Primavera Enterprise (5.0), Primavera have included an evaluation copy (limited to ~25 activities) of Pertmaster (using the name Monte Carlo, previously used for the Primavera product superseded by Pertmaster). Users who wish to upgrade to an unrestricted version have to contact Pertmaster and purchase a licence.
Pertmaster also works "out of the box" with MS Project and Welcom Open Plan. If you want to do Schedule Risk Analysis and Cost Risk Analysis, nothing else comes close to Pertmaster for speed and range of features. Pertmaster’s scheduling engine is written in Assembler, which makes it extremely fast.
For exclusively Cost Risk Analysis, Crystal Ball or @Risk are competitive and a comparison of features and value for money is warranted.

In July, I carried out a schedule risk analysis on the completion of an LNG train in the middle east using Pertmaster, interfacing with P3 3.1. The P50 forecast of 14Nov05 of the Ready for Startup Date (RFSU) I reported in early August came within 1 day of the actual RFSU date (13Nov05). The P90 date was 21Nov05 and the Deterministic Schedule (& Contractual) RFSU date was 31Oct05.
Pertmaster allows you to work with real schedules and make meaningful predictions (but note that it is important to include correlation in your analyses).
I will be reporting on this and another LNG plant schedule risk analysis in an Australian Primavera User Group conference paper next April.

Regards
Colin Cropley
Melbourne, Australia

Dear Norzul

Is pert master compatible to p3e?

TA
ALI

I believe this PERTMASTER is very easy to use and its quite user friendly software. It can be used with both P3 and MS Project.

Dear all

What about PERT MASTER.

ALI

I met Mr. Lev Virine at the PMI Global Congress a few weeks ago. His company is marketing a new program called RiskyProject that uses an Event Chain Methodology for risk management. It looks interesting.

Bernard Ertl
InterPlan Systems - eTaskMaker Project Planning Software

Colin,
shorter durations invite to measure activity duration in hours or minutes.
I agree that using Monte Carlo for large schedules is not practical.

Dear Sirs,

There is a Line-of-Balance based schedule planning and control software including a full CPM engine, which has easy-to-use Monte Carlo risk analysis features. This is a very powerful tool because the dependencies of the whole activity (consisting of multiple locations) are copied to all locations. This means that it is possible to model very big projects (10 000 + activities in P3) using only some activities in DYNAProject (50 activities) and using the same schedule logic (all link types with delays supported).

Resource leveling is done automatically in LoB by optimizing work continuity in locations for every trade.

Risk analysis is standard Monte Carlo simulation with pessimistic, expected and optimistic duration evaluations for each location of a task. In addition to showing likelihood of achieving end date and milestones, criticality indexes and other standard stuff, DYNAProject also shows where project flow is likely to be disturbed thus causing extra costs (risk of subcontractor leaving the site and associated come-back delays)


More information available from http://www.dss.fi/pages/index.php?section=English.DSSCompany

..or from www.projectflow.com.au if you are based in Australia, New Zealand or South-East Asia.

Best Regards,

Olli Seppänen
technology manager
Dynamic System Solutions Ltd.

Bernard,
resource productivity should be normed if you want to be sure that different schedules in your organization are created using the same basis. I strongly oppose the approach when project planner estimates activity duration separately, not using corporate standards, if this activity is typical. Project Office shall create corporate norms that are mandatory for use in any projects that contain typical activities and resource assignments.

When you create project schedule you plan the standard work week, etc. Actual data will show that you had problems if productivity was dropped due to people overwork, etc. Long shifts mean poor planning or poor performance, or risk events. These data are actual. We usually suggest to develop and to use three point estimates for resource productivity and these estimates also serve as the corporate standards.

Other factors:
1) Weather - actual event. It is covered by three point estimates when project schedule is created. Weather is risk factor from the scheduling point of view.
2) Equipment is a resource that is assigned to activity. And of course productivity depends on the set of resources assigned to perform an activity. It is just different type of assignment if different equipment is used. Productivity depends on type of assignment.
3) Type of assignment depends on type of activity, type of resource (resources with different skills are resources of different types) or type of the team (we call it multiresource) that is assigned to perform an activity. Workplace saturation defines activity type.

In any case it is necessary to implement common approach to activity duration and cost estimation within an organization. Productivity norms create this common approach and should be used to be sure that any schedule is based on the same initial information even it is not correct. Project Office reponsibility - to control the norms that are used and improve them if actual data show that initial estimation were wrong.

And of course I mean detailed level - operations.

Colin,
risk management is an ongoing activity and in our approach we analyze and simulate risks at least once a week. During this analysis we estimate trends of probabilities to meet project objectives successfully. Performance is measured and managed on the detailed level and there are problems with creating and using less detailed model. One of them you had mentioned - activity dependencies are defined on the detailed level and less detailed model will not be accurate. Besides the level of detalization is defined by resource levelling requirements - you will not be able to level resources if your schedule is not accurate about resource requirements. And you shall simulate risk events along with uncertainties, so three point estimates are not sufficient. I will download Pertmaster software (I had known their scheduling package in the beginning of 90-s but did not try their risk simulation software) but in any case my concerns refer not to the software but to the approach. Proper application of Monte Carlo technique is too time consuming to be practical. Inproper application of this technique will produce unreliable results.

The computer model of the Caspian pipeline (only 750 km portion) construction consisted of near 10000 activities, 1145 resource types (not including materials - there were near one hundred of them in the model). The number of activities was defined by resource levelling requirements and could not be lowered. Initial information included resource productivities and uncertainties were linked with their estimates (too hard to input correlations manually), there were risk events, like flooding, problems with obtaining some permissions, etc. Some of these risk events may lead to the productivity problems, others - to the scope changes (conditional branches). It is just an example illustrating my concern about reliable applicability of the Monte Carlo technique to the real projects. In Spider Project resource levelling of this project takes near 3 minutes and it is only one pass. I don’t think that other software can produce resource constrained schedule of the project of that size faster.
I don’t think that 200 iterations will be sufficient for this project. I am not worried with the possible error (initial data are not that reliable), I want to be sure that the next calculation will produce the same result. As I wrote earlier risk level is not that important as the trend of that level during project performance. Trends produce early warning and are very good indicators of the project performance. You cannot evaluate trends if the calculation results are not stable.
There is one other issue. Resource levelling algorithms used by different software are different too. If you use Pertmaster for risk simulation and Primavera for project management then you may have a problem because different schedules were simulated. What do you think about this?
Vladimir

Colin,
thank you for your reply.
But I am not sure that 5000 repetitions is sufficient for projects consisting of 10000 or more activities. This size of projects is quite usual in construction. I suspect that using this number of repetitions you will receive different estimates each time you run Monte Carlo simulation.
If you level resources in projects of that size then each scheduling try will take minutes. Even if you restrict the number of repetitions by 5000 (I repeat that this number does not look sufficient) then Monte Carlo simulation will take hundreds of hours. But you need to do it not only during planning stage but also during project performance. This is my concern about the number of necessary iterations and stability of simulation results.
The number of project risk events (and corresponding conditional branches) that should be simulated may be large too - and it means that project model may become several times larger than the initial and will become too complicated to work with on a day-to-day basis.
Do you agree with my concerns or you have another experience and oppinion?

What do you think about the number of tries you need to perform using Monte Carlo simulation for large projects?
Do you agree that activity duration depends on assigned resource productivity and if this productivity estimate is wrong then it will lead to the wrong duration estimates for all activities performed by this resource? Activitiy durations are correlated and I don’t know the Monte Carlo simulation software that takes these correlations into account. In this case the results of Monte Carlo simulation are wrong.
There are many other issues that also deserve to be discussed.
I have an impresiion that people use this approach without estimating the reliability of the Monte Carlo simulation results.

I strongly recommend that readers of this forum take a look at a Monte Carlo type risk analysis application produced by Pertmaster (www.pertmaster.com), which I first reviewed for the Victorian Primavera User Group in Australia two years ago. Pertmaster is a UK company that started over 12 years ago selling a project planning and scheduling application. In the last 5 years they have concentrated on schedule risk analysis. The application is very fast and markedly superior to Primavera’s Monte Carlo product, so much so that Primavera has made Pertmaster a Primavera Partner and is actively helping Pertmaster to promote Pertmaster use by Primavera’s own client base.
Pertmaster will read and write to P3 files (& SureTrak) as well as P3e/TeamPlay. It also reads and writes to MS Project. It will perform time and cost risk analysis, including cost analysis independent of time. It includes probabilistic tasks and branching, as well as positive and negative correlation and tornado diagrams to identify schedule and cost drivers.
This is Not a product promo /spam, as I was a member of Planning Planet long before trying Pertmaster. However, I did suggest that this Schedule Risk forum be started by Planning Planet after I became a Pertmaster Solutions Partner (provide consulting and training in Pertmaster) and was asked by a Pertmaster user whether a forum could be established for Pertmaster users. I felt that a generic Schedule Risk Forum on the Planning Planet would be more useful, and would give users of other software, such as @Risk for Project, Monte Carlo and Open Plan’s Monte Carlo functionality, as well as others with a developing interest in the subject, the opportunity to participate in helpful discussions.
So far, the forum has fulfilled those hopes!
Colin Cropley

Risks like flood shall be simulated, eartquakes and other force majeures shall be insured. We have experience of planning risks in pipeline construction projects (Caspian pipeline construction, Jamal - Europe pipeline and others)using other software. So let’s hope that somebody will explain how to use Monte Carlo for Primavera P3 to simulate not only uncertainties but risk events too. I am rather sceptical about applicability of Monte Carlo simulation to the large projects.
Regards,
Vladimir

Good point Guy.

I recall a discussion where material procurements were being scheduling at the latest possible moment. This, of course, invites a measure of risk that the material will not be delivered on time for any number of reasons (out of stock / back-ordered, damaged merchandise needing replacement, force majuer, Murphy’s Law, etc.). I do not think that this type of risk can be accurately qualified/quantified/modeled by variable duration estimates.

Bernard Ertl
InterPlan Systems Inc. - Project Management Software, Project Planning Software

Software Monte Carlo cannot provide quantitative analysis. The study of probability only.

RisGen is to identify a risk, study the impact, any remendy, cost involve for pre-castion or action, etc.

Doesn’t Monte Carlo analysis give quantitative results?
Can anyone describe Risgen and what it does please?