QUANTITATIVE RISK ASSESSMENT FOR PROJECTS SCHEDULES

Despite vigilant efforts in project scheduling and planning by engineers and project managers, recent market research reported a marked decrease in project success rates. The market research tracked projects across a broad range of industries and concluded the primary failure causes to be a lack of sufficient detail in the project planning stage, poor or no risk analysis, scope creep and poor communication. This paper focuses on a strategy to minimize the first cause. Specifically, how to obtain sufficient schedule and resource estimates to better predict time allocation and expected costs with a focus on capital pipeline projects. To this end, a quantitative risk assessment (QRA) methodology is applied to project schedules allowing the uncertainty of key task durations and/or costs to be fully accounted for in the schedule. Projects managers will be able to quantify the uncertainty in their projects and support decision makers with a more accurate prediction of the likelihood of being on time and on budget. This paper introduces a systematic approach for both aleatory and epistemic uncertainty quantification. In addition, the expected benefits of adopting QRA for projects schedules are discussed through a hypothetical simple project schedule from the pipeline industry.