By Fredy Rhoehrs
Plenty of risk, slow growth and unpredictable forecasting is what I hear when I am speaking with project managers today. Large organizations are facing big challenges in today’s economy. The most obvious of these is the euro zone’s debt crisis, which will limit growth for companies across the entire world.
More preoccupied with risks than opportunities, companies will remain cautious in their spending and project management investments.
“When a risk occurs, with some ingenuity, this may open up an opportunity, and conversely when pursuing an opportunity there will be associated risks. Risks are generally deemed acceptable if the possible gains exceed the possible losses.” – Rory Burke
What’s the view?
I believe project managers today will need to have an objective view of required contingency to account for cost and schedule uncertainty as well as analyzing the cost effectiveness of risk response plans. All project managers should be able to run applications and technology in order to:
- Identify common scheduling pitfalls that may result in misleading schedule or risk analysis results
- Integrate pre-developed risk registers and define new risk registers
- Address full lifecycle risk management through advanced Monte Carlo-based cost and schedule analytics
- Report confidence levels with regards to finish dates, costs, float, internal rate of return and net present value
What’s the solution?
The solution lies in following a systematic process of identifying, analysing and responding to project risk over the full life-cycle of a project and being able to report accurately on risks and risk management plans.
One such solution is provided by Oracle’s Primavera software. Risk Analysis is a full lifecycle risk analytics solution integrating cost and schedule risk management. Primavera Risk Analysis provides a comprehensive means of determining confidence levels for project success together with quick and easy techniques for determining contingency and risk response plans.
You are invited to watch this educational video from the Primavera Youtube Channel related to how to reduce risk and complexity in large organizations:
Mega Project Management: Reducing Risk and Complexity
Let me know what your thoughts are and please enter your comments below in order to understand if your business challenges today could be resolved using Oracle Primavera.
About the author:
Fredy Roehrs is an experienced business development consultant for project management solutions in Oracle Primavera. With proven business relationships in Middle East, Latin America and Spain; he can provide real solutions to all the project management challenges your company face today.
For a better understanding of the Oracle Primavera application click here.
Appreciate it for helping out and providing good info about projects.
Your aritcle is full of useful information. keep it up. “How To Manage Projects In Today’s Risk Economy” – interesting title Linky. Great job Linky.
Cannot argue with anything said. Project plans are about the future and so are inherently uncertain. Not taking this into account is inviting disaster. Not everyone appreciates that deterministic schedules are not only missing any measure of the uncertainty but often seriously biased, due to the phenomenon of merge bias. ) So, the chance of achieving the end date predicted by a deterministic schedule may be very small.
But not everyone uses Primavera. In the aerospace and defense industry, where risk analysis is often mandated, Microsoft Project is the tool of choice, with Barbecana’s Full Monte add-in for risk analysis.
Your blog is showing enthusiasm and many interesting articles. Thank you so much.
Thanks for sharing this blog. I learned a lot and found this very helpful.
Good article and comments…
One of the biggest challenges in risk analysis is avoiding erroneous inputs when developing the model itself – project teams generally don’t understand (or care about) the complexities associated with the likes of distribution types. While PRA is a solid tool for running risk analysis against Primavera schedules, it also takes a lot of manpower to build sound models. Acumen Risk takes away this complexity for Primavera users that are wanting to incorporate their project risk registers with their cost and schedule risk models. Check out
for a more complete description.
Acumen Risk reporting also steers projects away from the pitfalls of traditional risk reporting techniques such as confidence level which is an inherently flawed risk metric (as it is driven more by logic in the schedule than risk itself!). Project teams want to understand risk exposure in true cost and schedule terms – plain and simple!