Acumen 360
The constraints of time, cost, and scope on a project and the uncertainty and risk that accompany them are a management tightrope for even the best project teams. An unachievable time line or an unexpected delay can easily tip your balance, forcing your project in late and over budget.
Again and again projects are delivered later than planned because of unforeseen delays during execution or because of a less-thanoptimal plan to begin with—until Acumen 360™.
Acumen 360 generates schedule scenarios in real time, allowing you to hypothesize acceleration opportunities or threats of delay and immediately see the impact. With 360 you can identify areas where acceleration is possible, helping you make up for lost time during execution or identify a path for coming in earlier during planning.
Identify the optimal plan
360’s highly interactive engine gives you:
‘What If’ Analysis
Identify the optimal plan
Even the best-laid plans can fall victim to project slips and delays and even the most aggressive schedules can contain potential areas for acceleration. Acumen 360 allows you to run ’what if’ analyses quickly that identify acceleration cases, hypothesize best and worst-case scenarios, and recover impact of delays.
360’s highly interactive engine gives you:
• Realistic acceleration and optimization options based on the base project schedule;
• A real-time view of how potential setbacks or opportunities for acceleration impact the project finish dates; and,
• An automatically created schedule scenario that is easily exported to Primavera or Microsoft Project.
‘What If’ Analysis
Project teams know the questions to ask about the issues facing their projects. The challenge is getting intelligent answers. Acumen 360 helps you answer questions like, “what happens if Contractor A takes six weeks longer than planned?” or, “if I accelerate construction by 20%, how much sooner can I deliver the project?” The power to answer these questions, and prepare for the answers, keeps a project team ahead of the curve and able to examine as many hypothetical situations as necessary.
Interactive
Acumen 360 Duration Calibration allows you to add or reduce duration on a single activity, groups of activities, an entire WBS (work breakdown structure), or the entire project schedule interactively.
Select activities that “Require Less Time” than planned or those that require more and see the effects of these adjustments on the project completion date in real time.
Automatic Goal-Based
Acumen 360 allows you to generate the fastest project scenario possible with the click of a button.
Rather than trying to meet a set project goal, this automatic simulation determines the earliest finish date possible while still accounting for your acceleration criteria.
Targeted
Only you know where acceleration is feasible within a project. Acumen 360 takes into account your knowledge of the schedule to target specific areas for acceleration and set the limits for reducing durations. 360’s intuitive features make it easy to set an acceleration goal and guide the scenario generation with precision.
Acumen 360 intelligent pinpoint acceleration or deceleration is based on proven technology.
Acumen 360 does not use an imprecise ‘network crash’ approach. Once all user inputs are made, 360 uses its CPM engine to run thousands of simulations that attempt to meet the defined goal again and again. After the analysis is run the best option for achieving the project goal is presented. This method of incremental adjustments to achieve an accelerated schedule means that scenarios are realistic enough to be used as the project plan going forward.
- User-based intelligence – the ability to control acceleration with user inputs means building a scenario that can actually be used. It puts you in control of scenario generation.
- Powerful engine – generating scenarios in minutes instead of hours keeps the project team moving forward without the lengthy reworking required by manual processes.
- Repeatable process – the calibration sliders in Acumen 360 mean running “what-If…” analyses again and again – hypothesizing any potential project downside or upside.
- Defendable results – making data-backed decisions gives project teams the confidence to make a case for their decisions whether mitigation plans, reallocation of resources, or contract changes are in order.
- Complete customization – beyond customizing acceleration inputs, customizing and saving options such as the acceleration rates and the order of compression gives the user complete control.