Managing Planning & Scheduling by Quantifying The Risk and Expressing The Level of Confidence

The question we should ask during initial planning is not just “How long will it take?” Better questions would be: “How likely is it that we can make our schedule? How likely is it we will meet this cost constraint? How likely is it that our team size is sufficient?” The questions should include this qualifier: “How likely?”

Likewise, the answer should not be “12 months”. It should include the risk. “It’s likely we can do this in 12 months. Planning for 14 months would be very conservative. Ten months Is plausible, but quite risky. But there is no way it will get done in 6 months. Not only has our team never done that much that fast, but nobody in the industry has!” Quantifying the risk and expressing the level of confidence allows us to keep all levers as flexible as possible. We can plan for contingencies, allowing the most flexible levers to adjust as the project is carried out so we meet our constraints. (QSM 2012).

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