Acumen Risk and Primavera Risk Analysis ( aka Pertmaster)

I am evaluating a right risk tool for our company and it seems there are 2 options in front if us i.e,. Acumen Risk and Primavera Risk Analysis ( aka Pertmaster). Has anyone done any comparative assessment to allow to choose the right fit for individuals requirement. Appreciate any pointers, guidance or thoughts you may have on this. Thanks.

I had a spare week last year and looked at both as well as options that use MS Project. PRA has known design limitations and some bugs that restrict what one might expect it to be able to do but it has the design intent of being a rich modelling environment. A good modeller who understands what they are trying to do and takes account of its limitations can do a lot with it. Not everything one would like but quite a lot. If I set one at a low level task and, leaving it locked, change the slider at the summary level, I take it that the summary level factor has no effect on the detailed level task. Is that correct? Unlike the admittedly rudimentary but nevertheless useful risk factors in PRA, it seems that I cannot apply two or more factors to one activity. Is that correct? For instance, I might want to represent the effect of quantity uncertainty on the duration of earthworks and separately apply a productivity uncertainty associated with the workforce and perhaps a further factor associated with the management of the earthmoving fleet and truck reliability . There seems to be a strict hierarchical arrangement so that I cannot apply a single factor to a subset of the activities under one summary item. It has to be applied to all or they each have to have their own factor. s that correct? 3- existence allows for representation of something equivalent to a limited form of branching, e.g. rework or no rework, but is there any true branching capability that would allow us to have two paths from a node only one of which, with its effect on costs and overall duration, will be taken into account in a particula r iteration. 4- the same feature, is it possible to have a whole block of activities that either occur or not, say not just rework but rework followed by regression testing and review activities? Another example might be to construct a shallow road tunnel using road headers to bore the passage, represented by a set of activities, or cut a way through from above as a channel and cover the passage to make it a tunnel, which again will require a set of activities to represent it.< /span> 5 - risk events’ likelihoods are associated with a band of probabilities, which probability is used to model the occurrence of the event? Is it the mid point of the range, the threshold (low point) for the range or something else.< ;/span> 6. Are risks always applied pro rata to a group of activities? Is there a way to apply a risk in the sa me way to all activities in a group, as with a flood causing a part of a site to become isolated so that all work in t at area stops for a couple of weeks. 7. If among my project activities I have risk events that have a 1 day impact, some that have a 5 day im pact, some 10, some 15, some 20, an odd one that has a 30 day effect and something even worse, it seems I wouldn’t be a ble to represent them all in the risk register because it is confined to five discrete impact levels. Is this correct? < ;/span> 8. How is correlation applied. Is it applied to all the distributions at once so that all distributions i n a model are linked to one another? 9. I take it there is no way to correlate selected groups of activities independently of one another. < ;/span> 10. The cost risk modelling isn’t clear to me. I presume that the cost estimate has to be imported against the same WBS as the schedule. Is this correct? Is it possible to designate some costs as being duration dependent and some as fixed or are they all proportional to duration? Can a cost be partially duration dependent? This is common with contractors’ on-site facilities, for instan ce, where some costs, such as on-site vehicles, rise as the job extends but others, such as mobilisation and demobilisat ion, are unaffected. 11. Is there any means of applying uncertainty to calendars?

I’ve been using Pert Master (now Primavera Risk Analysis) since 2004. It’s quantitative risk analysis tool based on Latin Hypercube Sampling / Monte Carlo Simulation. From my experience it’s mostly a tool to evaluate and fine tune CPM schedules by building scenarios; (garbage in garbage out). CPM scheduling systems lacks similar facility. Although Qualitative Analysis (Risk Register) and cost risk analysis facilities are included majority of the end users predominantly used it for schedule / time risk analysis. No major product upgrades have been brought out by Primavera since taking over the product in 2005-2006. I haven’t had a chance to use Acumen Fuse, although they are sending lot of literature regularly. It’s a new product compared to the Primavera Risk Analysis. If you are predominantly going to use it for schedule risk analysis of Primavera (P6) CPM schedules, then I would advise you give some weightage to the fact that portability of information may be better between P6 and Primavera Risk Analysis.

I looked at these two products two years ago, I lauding bringing in the Acumen team. At the time Acumen was clear that theirs was a companion product, not a replacement or competitor to Pimavera Risk Analysis (PRA). I believe the primary difference at that time was that PRA did Monte Carlo analysis and Acumen chose not to include that feature (as to not be in competiton with PRA). There was duplication of some features in both. What I found at that time was that Acumen allowed for much more granularity and fine tuning as well as having more diverse and robust analysis algorithms out of the box. Additionally, Acumen was very flexible with respect to bringing in WBS structures (activities and dates and durations, etc) from various sources (spreadsheet, P6, MS Project, eric) and tying these together of the analysis (which is fairly common on projects because vendors, partner firms, client, etc., use different tools for scheduling and planned progress). Lastly, I was impressed with the consulting capabilities of Acumen, as they were ready to sit down and work through the tool and scenarios to help you find the right analysis approach for your project / effort.

We have many people doing comparisons at this time. When customers ask me about the differences I highlight four things: 1 - Simplified Risk Loading Acumen Risk features highly visual uncertainty sliders. Quickly flag aggressive activities (those that require more time than planned) and conservative activities (those that will require less time than planned). Furthermore, assign uncertainty values to entire groups of activities with a single click eliminating the manual ‘fill down’ process. This means you can build a risk model against your actual project schedule, eliminating the need to create a separate rolled up, or high-level schedule. 2 - True Insight into Risk Exposure Acumen Risk comes with several unique reports that allow you to truly understand your project risk exposure. People have trouble making sense of "schedule sensitivity" and "cruciality" metrics in the Oracle product. Acumen Risk reports the impact of risk clearly in terms of time and money. The Risk Drivers report shows you not only the highest risk activities, but uses the Risk Contribution Factor™ to tell you the uncertainty, logic, and events driving that risk. The Risk Comparison report allows you to evaluate scenarios (such as mitigated vs. non-mitigated, or option A vs. option all in a single workbook. There are transient, intermediate "Impacted Risk Plan" files to have to worry about. 3 - Part of the Acumen Suite Acumen Risk functionality sits within the same "Window" as Acumen Fuse and Acumen 360 which together make up the Acumen Suite. Fuse allows for the diagnosis and resolution of shortcomings in your schedule saving you time and resulting in a more achievable plan. Acumen 360 allows for easy acceleration of time frames and recovery from delays. The three products work off of the same single data instance in the same window. They are completely integrated and coherent. 4 - Ongoing, Enthusiastic and Groundbreaking Software Development We on the Acumen Team are constantly improving our product. Our 4.1 release which will be released in the next two to three weeks breaks new ground with float analysis between any two points in the network and historical trending across arrayed project status updates. Last year we won the Planning and Scheduling Innovation of the Year award and were also included in the Inc Magazine 500www.inc.com/profile/&...> . Heres some recommended reading www.projectacumen.com/ www.projectacumen.com/

Both are the Risk Mitigation tools of project planning Acumen Risk Analysis : • It is combining both Integrated cost & schedule risk analysis • There is an uncertainty factor which may not be foreseen while anticipation i.e Acumen Risk’s Uncertainty Factor • It is well capable to accurately capture team perception of project. • It is well Intelligent Risk Reporting • Finally, I agree with Richard. I found the Acumen system has improved dramatically as one can model against facility matrix and the availability of cloud application. Primavera Risk Analysis • It will identify common scheduling pitfalls that may result in misleading schedule or risk analysis results • Integrate pre developed risk registers and define new risk registers • Address full lifecycle risk management through advanced Monte Carlo-based cost and schedule analytics • Report confidence levels with regards to finish dates, costs, float, internal rate of return and net present value