Quantitative Risk Analysis

1.Assign a numerical rating to those risks
2.Quantitative approach
Monte Carlo simulation
Decision tree analysis

What-if Scenario Analysis

attention

1.Which of the following includes asking team members about the time estimates for their tasks and developing agreement on the calendar date for each task?

A.Activity sequencing
B.Schedule development
C.Scope definition
D.Initiation

By the time this activity is taking place, initiation, scope definition and activity sequencing would be completed.
(B)

2.A project manager for a small construction company has a project that was budgeted for US $130,000 over a six-week period. According to her schedule, the project should have cost US $60,000 to date. However, it has cost US $90,000 to date. The project is also behind schedule, because the original estimates were not accurate. Who has the PRIMARY responsibility to solve this problem?

A.Project manager
B.Senior management
C.Project sponsor
D.Manager of the project office

Schedule management is a responsibility of the project manager. This question could have been placed in many different chapters since it relates to cost, integration, human resources and time.

3.Which of the following risk events is MOST likely to interfere with attaining a project's schedule objective?

4.Your company has just presented its new five-year strategic plan. You have received a new product request from a customer that is in line with the previous five-year strategic plan, but it does not meet the objectives of the new plan. The product description seems to have a valid business driver and to be a straightforward development effort. As project manager, what is the BEST course of action?

Schedule Compression

There are two ways to compress the schedule
1.Crashing
2.Fast tracking

What is Crashing:
It means adding more resources to a project to shorten its duration.

"Crashing" the schedule means to throw additional resources to the critical path without necessarily getting the highest level of efficiency.

For instance, let’s say one person was working on a ten-day activity on the critical path. If you were really desperate to shorten this timeframe, you might add a second resource to this activity. In fact, the resource may not have all the right skills and he might work five days just to reduce the overall time by two days.

On the surface, the prior tradeoff might not make sense. After all, why would you have a person work five days just to reduce an activity by two days? It's not efficient. However, can you imagine a project that was so important that you were willing to make this kind of tradeoff? Think about the YR2K projects. When the end of 1999 was rolling around, many companies were throwing resources onto projects; desperate to get them completed on time. They were fast-tracking.

Reference 1

What is Fast tracking:

Fast tracking means that you look at activities that are normally done in sequence and assign them instead partially in parallel.

Fast-tracking always involves risk that could lead to increased cost and some rework later. For instance, in the example of designing and constructing an application, it’s possible that the design might change before it is finalized, and those final changes may result in having to redo some of the construct work already underway.

A good rule of thumb is that sequential activities can sometimes be fast-tracked by up to 33%. In other words(換句話說), if you're fast-tracking, you can start the second of two sequential activities when the first activity is 66% complete. There is risk involved. However, this seems to be a level of fast-tracking risk that is normally acceptable.

Reference 1