ScheduleRisk Analysis
ScheduleRiskAnalysis
Answer the Questions: “Will This Finish Within Budget and On Schedule?”
Meet Deadlines and Plan Contingencies using Monte Carlo Simulation
ScheduleRiskAnalysis (or SRA) is a complete toolset within @RISK that enables project managers to account for uncertain variables in project schedules. Working within the familiar Excel environment, SRA lets you perform risk modeling on project files created in Primavera P6 or Microsoft Project. Simply read those files into SRA, and instantly apply all the power and flexibility of @RISK Monte Carlo simulation in Excel. Scheduling applications like Project or P6 lack the ability to account for uncertain variables, such as unknown task dates, durations, or resource usages. SRA fills this gap by bringing the most powerful risk analysis technology on the market to your schedules, while preserving 100% of the integrity and logic of your original model. Best of all, you can now combine your cost risk models with your schedule models all in one place – integrated project risk management in your spreadsheet!
Overview
ScheduleRiskAnalysis analyzes schedule risk using Monte Carlo simulation with @RISK. This means SRA shows you virtually all possible outcomes in your schedule – and tells you how likely each is to occur. SRA helps you judge which risks to take, and which ones to avoid. SRA also ranks your risks, enabling you to identify the variables which impact your schedule the most. With SRA, you can:
Avoid otherwise unseen schedule delays or extra costs
Identify new opportunities to save time or accomplish tasks more efficiently
Understand critical factors affecting your schedule, so you can make contingency plans
Create contingency budgets based on probabilistic data
Communicate risks effectively to others, from team members to management
Combine your schedule models with existing Excel-based cost models
Industries using @RISK for Schedule Risk Analysis
Energy & Utilities
Insurance & Reinsurance
Finance & Banking
Manufacturing & Consumer Goods
Construction & Engineering
Aerospace & Defense
Customer Success Stories with SRA
Learn how SRA helps project managers and executives improve decision-making.
Michael Watson
Integrated Program Planning - NASA Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, Lockheed Martin
@RISK tells us the probability of making our contractual dates and highlights any areas of risk that we may not have identified. We want to know what it’s going to take to hit our milestones on time – for example, launch is extremely important.
Dan Estrada
Project Manager, Gannett Fleming
@RISK facilitates an integrated approach to quantifying schedule and cost risks and offers concise evaluations of their potential impacts. The software allows us to confidently address FTA requirements.
Martin Hopkinson
Consultant for the UK Ministry of Defence
Quantitative risk analysis forecasts [are] a key tool in an organization’s process for approving major projects, and @RISK has been proven to be a good tool for modeling risk on major UK defense projects.
Dr Chakradhar Iyyunni
Deputy General Manager and Faculty, L&T Institute of Project Management
We chose @RISK for its ease of use and compatibility with Microsoft Excel. @RISK imports all the analysis into Excel, which means that we can use all the formulae in the software alongside all the @RISK features – a powerful combination for statistical analysis.
How SRA is Used
SRA has a multitude of applications, including:
- Transportation Planning
- Defense Projects
- Aerospace Engineering
- Construction
- Integrated Schedule and Cost Risk Analysis
Transportation Planning
Manage uncertain schedule outcomes, create contingency plans, and quantify cost risks to meet federal compliance requirements, secure funding, and ensure promised outcomes for all stakeholders. Account for highly uncertain usage forecasts to meet demand for decades to come.
Defense Projects
Plan complex strategies for the development, manufacture, and procurement of military equipment. Risks on such projects are heightened by goals that push the limits of technical feasibility, and involve great cost. Understand the risk factors and probabilities of different outcomes to meet approval requirements and improve on-time, in-budget deliveries.
Aerospace Engineering
Understand the likelihood of hitting milestones to launch, and the impact delays have on downstream phases of multi-year, high-risk space and aeronautics projects. Generate and analyze large amounts of data for analysis of failure points and to identify areas of new opportunities.
Construction
Account for uncertain construction costs and unknown build schedules in commercial and residential projects in order to secure financing and meet regulatory requirements. Assess demand for use of facilities decades into the future. Identify major risks of delay and overrun, and develop reasonable contingency plans to keep development projects on track.
Integrated Schedule and Cost Risk Analysis
Assess variation around duration, start date, and end dates, as well as add uncertainty to unknown costs and resource requirements for various tasks in a project. Simulate both schedule and costs to determine the chance of achieving completion dates at different funding levels. Determine contingency requirements at given confidence levels.
Transportation Planning
Transportation Planning
Manage uncertain schedule outcomes, create contingency plans, and quantify cost risks to meet federal compliance requirements, secure funding, and ensure promised outcomes for all stakeholders. Account for highly uncertain usage forecasts to meet demand for decades to come.
Defense Projects
Defense Projects
Plan complex strategies for the development, manufacture, and procurement of military equipment. Risks on such projects are heightened by goals that push the limits of technical feasibility, and involve great cost. Understand the risk factors and probabilities of different outcomes to meet approval requirements and improve on-time, in-budget deliveries.
Aerospace Engineering
Aerospace Engineering
Understand the likelihood of hitting milestones to launch, and the impact delays have on downstream phases of multi-year, high-risk space and aeronautics projects. Generate and analyze large amounts of data for analysis of failure points and to identify areas of new opportunities.
Construction
Construction
Account for uncertain construction costs and unknown build schedules in commercial and residential projects in order to secure financing and meet regulatory requirements. Assess demand for use of facilities decades into the future. Identify major risks of delay and overrun, and develop reasonable contingency plans to keep development projects on track.
Integrated Schedule and Cost Risk Analysis
Integrated Schedule and Cost Risk Analysis
Assess variation around duration, start date, and end dates, as well as add uncertainty to unknown costs and resource requirements for various tasks in a project. Simulate both schedule and costs to determine the chance of achieving completion dates at different funding levels. Determine contingency requirements at given confidence levels.
Key Features
In addition to all the features available in @RISK, SRA provides robust project-specific functionality:
Proven Monte Carlo Simulation for Project Schedules
@RISK’s Monte Carlo algorithms have been proven over decades of innovation and refinement – since 1984. SRA brings this technology to durations, start dates, finish dates, and costs in your schedule, enabling robust risk analysis never before possible.
Integrate Schedule and Cost Risk
Add schedule risk modeling to your existing Excel-based cost models to view the complete picture of your project. Build risk registers in your spreadsheet that link to your schedule models and add delays or costs as risk events occur.
Define Uncertainty Easily and Accurately
Define and update probability distributions to represent uncertainty in project elements – such as durations, dates, and costs. Choose from dozens of distribution types for the highest level of accuracy. Do this in batches to save time.
Streamlined Model Setup
Convenient parameters for Optimistic, Most Likely, and Pessimistic scenarios make defining your uncertain inputs quick and easy for commonly-used distributions.
Activity Capacity
Manage hundreds or thousands of different activities.
Probabilistic Gantt Charts
Simulation results are reported in Gantt chart format, both standard and probabilistic. Probabilistic Gantt charts add visual indicators for key simulation statistics such as mean, standard deviation, min and max. This tells you – at a glance – the likelihood of different durations and finish dates for individual tasks, groups of tasks, or the whole project. All Gantt charts are dynamic and update with every simulation.
Critical Indices
Assess the importance of a task by evaluating the percentage of the time it occurs on the project’s critical path.
Schedule Audits
Check a project schedule to identify entries that can affect simulation results or lead to inaccuracies. This lets you make changes to the original schedule model before you spend time on a simulation.
If/Then Conditional Modeling
Leverage native Excel IF statements to enable more complex logic through conditional modeling during a Monte Carlo simulation. This enables more accurate modeling of contingency plans and is not possible to do in standard scheduling applications.
Part of the DecisionTools Suite
The complete risk and decision analysis toolkit, including @RISK, PrecisionTree, TopRank, NeuralTools, StatTools, Evolver, RISKOptimizer, and ScheduleRiskAnalysis.
Additional Benefits
Subscription
- Free upgrades when new software versions are released
- Full access to Technical Support
Support
- Included with subscription
- Phone, web, or email
Customizable
- Engage Palisade to design your solution
- Standardize your analyses and reduce learning curves