Schedule Risk Management Sequencing

Construction schedule forecasting is an important part of the risk management process and allows the team to establish capital and resource allocations with greater efficiency. Risk assessment includes both the identification of potential risk and the evaluation of the potential impact of the risk. Being able to accurately define the duration of a sequence of tasks helps to mitigate risk. To do so you must first know how to measure and manage those risks. If you can’t identify your pitfalls your project will fail fast. Risk management starts in the initial phases of project conception and is managed and developed along the entire project plan timeline.  

      ? Establish Logical Flow of How Activities Lead to Completion of Project

o  Define How Activities are Related

o  Determine Order that Tasks Must be Done

o  Identify Milestone Activities and Bottlenecks

     ? Estimate Activity Duration Times

     ? Evaluate Project Completion Time

o  Construct Critical Path

o  Sum Estimated Duration Times of Activities that are on the Critical Path to Estimate Total Project Duration

o  Compare the Total-Duration Estimate with Project’s Required Completion Time

Risk Management can support your project schedule in identifying and thereby avoiding the dangers of your project and strengthen the core aspects of your schedule or business model through deep insight and scenario play.

Risk Management

The objective of risk management is to ensure the unforeseen doesn’t sideline the project from achieving its goals. It is a process that includes the identification, assessment and prioritization of risk to control the probability of impact. There are a few ideas to follow which can help you begin the process of identifying your path.

Identification

What are the risks that could affect the outcome of your project? Recognize, uncover and describe factors that could prohibit you from reaching the defined objectives? Risk factors don’t simply occur they evolve as a series of events. The key to success is in pre-identifying these possible events through discussions and scenario roll playing, based on historical data when possible, in advance of project commencement. 

There are a many way of establishing solid risk management strategies. The following are a few examples of how people identify schedule or project risk:

• Brainstorming   ? Interviews
• Risk surveys   ? Root cause analysis
• SWOT analysis  ? Influence diagrams
• Assumption analysis

During this initial phase, any form of analysis is simply for information gathering purposes. Identifying the causes of an issue and developing preventative techniques is the main motivation for identifying risk.

Analysis

Identifying the sources of risk by category is another method for exploring potential risk on a project. Once risks are correctly identified, it is time to analyze them and prioritize that which will have the greatest impact on your project Some examples of categories for potential risks include the following:

• Technical  ? Cost
• Schedule   ? Client
• Contractual ? Weather
• Budget  ? Political
• Environmental  ? Community

During risk assessment, it is important you have the proper tools at your disposal to effectively mitigate the potential hazard. Risk analysis is generally lumped into two main categories: Qualitative and Quantitative.

Qualitative & Quantitative Risk Analysis

Qualifying risks involves making a simple list of the risks themselves, along with ranking them and mapping them out. The following are some common techniques used for assessing risks from a qualitative aspect:

• Probability and impact assessment and matrix: Analyzing and rating risks using probability and impact on things like cost, schedule and performance.
• Risk categorization: Grouping risks by common root causes to develop effective responses.
• Risk urgency: The risk ranking from your probability matrix combined with urgency can help place risks priorities.
• Expert judgment: Professional opinions from people in the industry or with similar project experience.

In addition to looking at the qualities of risks, you should also quantify the risks and use both analysis within your risk management strategies. Here are a few ways to consider counting your risks:

• Probability distributions: Used in modeling and simulation to represent the uncertainty of values in things like task costs and labor.
• Cost and Schedule risk analysis: Cost estimates and scheduling are used as input values that are chosen randomly for each iteration.
• Sensitivity analysis: This is a simple technique to determine how much impact a risk poses to a project.
• Expected Monetary Value analysis (EMV): Calculating the average outcome of scenarios that may or may not happen.

Once you’ve identified your risks you can now begin your planning.

Planning

Once you’ve identified your mitigating risks and begin the planning phase you will begin to mange your Risk profiles and begin the planning process:

• Assessments and meetings: Ongoing risk assessments and status meetings should be scheduled for reassessment of current risks and the closing of risks. It should always be an agenda at status meetings and a continual topic of conversation.
• Risk audits: Examining and documenting how effective current risk responses are is part of the auditing process. It also looks at the efficacy of the risk management process as a whole.
• Variance and Trend analysis: Comparing planned results to actual results using performance data to control and monitor risk events. 
• Technical performance measurement: Comparing technical accomplishments as the project is executed to what is on the main schedule.

Risk management isn’t just about understanding and knowing when risks may occur. It is also planning for them and establishing an ongoing process to continually mitigate risk. A strong project manager understands that risk is always an element to consider, but it doesn’t have to be a surprise. Through these tools of identification, assessment and planning, the risk factor is properly mitigated and the project forges on successfully.