Schedule Risk Management - Construction Project Scheduling and Control - page 389

will see the benefits of schedule risk management. If the project management team
embarks on a second project that is designed by the same architect and engineers, and
the first project generated a high volume of requests for information in order to build
the project, that team will think twice about how to manage the new project. If the
team has participated in a project that had a good constructability review performed
and witnessed a small volume of requests for information, then they will recognize the
lowered risk of performance because of good quality control of the documents.
The discussion about the three-point duration estimates is useful, since it will
enable the project management team to evaluate duration estimates, rather than casu-
ally providing the durations or calculating durations strictly from third-party references
that may or may not be accurate for a specific project location or condition. This is an
important phase of planning: the development of realistic durations and logic relation-
ships driven by a statistical approach to common problems that are historically known
to be present on projects.
Risk analysis emphasizes that delays are often caused by near-critical path activities
that slip. The author has been involved in many dispute resolution cases in which the
schedule analysis exposes a delay that is caused by what is referred to as a mid-period
critical path shift, meaning that the critical path at the beginning of the period is not
the same as the critical path at the end of the period. Often participants in a dispute
look at the critical path at the beginning of the period, assess the changes to that path,
and never look at other paths that may overtake the current critical path.
With good risk management, parallel critical paths are examined statistically, pro-
viding results that are typically realistic across many projects. While individual projects
may and can differ, especially because of project management decisions and responses
to threats during construction, in the larger project experience, the statistics provide
a level of realism for planning and monitoring.
EXAMPLES OF RISK ADJUSTMENT
Some examples of risk-adjusted schedules include the development of a 3,200-activity
baseline schedule for a firing range for a state prison system. This project was a design-
bid-build municipal project, and, as such, the project was awarded on a low-bid basis.
The contractor for the project used the pricing from an earthwork subcontractor with
historical records showing low productivity in excavation. During development of the
schedule, while brainstorming specific risks for the master risk register, this risk was
identified. The risk was incorporated into the schedule by increasing durations for all
work to be done by this subcontractor. During routine updates, the durations of this
subcontractor's activities were reviewed in order to examine performance, in case the
risk was still not resolved.
Another example of a risk analysis involved a new port project that needed a high
volume of sand fill, with multiple ways to supply the sand. After determination of the
preferred method of sand supply, a resource-driven analysis schedule was developed
and resource loaded. This resource-loaded schedule provided what-if scenario sched-
ules by changing the resources and allowing them to drive the completion date. After