Comprehensive Project Risk Management

This book is about a new methodology that integrates the three project management dimensions of interest: time, cost and return (performance). The methodology analyzes their tradeoffs and relationships from the point of view of their uncertainty (previously identified risks).This is possible because I model time, cost and return as a beta distribution, thanks to a breakthrough into a way to calculate beta-distributed range and shape parameters.The Probabilistic Critical Path Method (PCPM) combines the advantages of both CPM and PERT. A heuristic able to do what I call probabilistic crashing finds the relationships between time and cost and then between time/cost and return.A specially designed interface shows on a flat screen the probability of not exceeding the due date and the budget, as well as the probability of exceeding the Minimum Attractive Rate of Return (MARR) and interactively lets the user consider different possibilities for the project. Finally, it considers both direct and indirect costs and provides the optimal tradeoff based on any given indirect cost slope.