Acumen Risk, Training, License - Prime PMO

DELTEK ACUMEN RISK

Simplified schedule and cost risk analysis

Acumen Risk

Accurate project scheduling and realistic cost forecasting can be the difference between being a project hero and being responsible for project failure.

While current scheduling tools provide a great foundation for project planning, you are still making the strong assumption tht your scope is 100% accurate and, regardless of what happens during execution, the project will finish on time.

In reality, projects don’t behave this way. Despite the best-laid plans, every project carries uncertainty and risk that all too often lead to cost and schedule overruns.

Acumen Risk™ helps you effectively account for and proactively reduce risk exposure resulting in an accurate forecast you can rely on.

Legacy risk tools require statistical expertise.However, asking a project team to relate to statistical complexities such as minimum and maximum ranges along with complex distribution types makes these risk tools ineffective at accurately capturing risk and uncertainty values.

Acumen Risk introduces an innovative method for capturing risk and uncertainty. Uncertainty factors are defined and assigned across groups of activities, eliminating the need for manual risk loading of every single activity. Native project schedules can be used as the basis of the risk model regardless of size and complexity. Project risk registers can be incorporated quickly into the model and risks are mapped to one or more activities.

By adopting Acumen’s Uncertainty Factor™ approach, project teams can focus on collaborating on the true inputs into the risk model rather than getting bogged down in statistical “analysis-paralysis”.

The Uncertainty Factor approach makes risk loading schedules fast and repeatable across multiple projects bringing uniformity of scoring within an organization.

Acumen Risk makes risk loading large schedules easy. Simply assign risk and uncertainty at whatever level you want to report risk exposure and let the model do the rest. Concerned about losing detail? The Acumen Risk approach actually ensures the opposite: the model itself is highly detailed and results are rolled up to a meaningful level.

Until now, generating a truly integrated cost/schedule risk model has been a complex task requiring the likes of resource-loaded schedules and creation of ‘cost activities’.

With Acumen Risk, those days are gone. Now, simply run your schedule risk analysis, and point the results to those cost elements that are impacted by schedule delay, and let Acumen Risk do the rest. The result: an accurate cost risk forecast that truly accounts for schedule risk exposure where relevant.

Whether you’ve already established a project risk register in an external tool, or you want to start from scratch, take advantage of the Acumen Risk risk register module. Track current state, and target or mitigated state as well as the steps needed to get there. Let Acumen Risk analyze the cost/benefit ratio and effectiveness of your proposed mitigation plan in order to make smarter, more informed decisions.

Some risk tools boast hundreds of risk reports, but few really give you the insight you’re looking for. Acumen Risk provides those reports that truly matter:

  • Team’s Perception of Risk: Executive summary of how many activities were perceived as aggressive, realistic or conservative. A great way to determine the team’s schedule buy-in.
  • Risk Exposure: A next-generation risk distribution report—quickly determine risk ranges, contingency, risk-adjusted values such as P50 and P75 dates, costs and risk exposure reporting for any given activity or WBS grouping.
  • Risk Drivers: Pinpoint which activities, risk events and driving paths are the leading cause of your project’s cost and schedule risk exposure.
  • Risk Comparison: Visually compare risk profiles across multiple scenarios including alternate mitigation strategies.
  • Acumen Risk Metrics: Take advantage of the numerous risk metrics built-into Acumen Fuse to further slice and dice your analysis.

During early concept, leading up to project sanction or even during execution, risk analysis is an invaluable tool for generating alternate scenarios. At the click of a button, run what-if analysis, or generate alternate scenarios including:

  • Mitigated vs. non mitigated,
  • Option A vs. Option B, or
  • Finding the two main network paths that carry the most risk driving out the completion date (e.g. facilities vs. pipeline)

Once generated, simply compare risk exposure for each scenario and make informed decisions about the best path forward. With Acumen Risk, risk analysis finally becomes a strategic component within your organization.

Unique to Acumen Risk, the Risk Contribution Factor™ is a quantitative measure (cost and schedule) of how much impact activities and risk events have on any given milestone or group of activities.

Rather than looking at an ordered list of activities in a traditional tornado chart showing relative impact, quickly pinpoint true risk contribution.

Find out if your project risk exposure is due to:

  • The knock-on effect of the sequence of activities (logic)
  • The duration uncertainty within certain activities, or
  • The impact of specific risk events.

Most importantly, Acumen Risk reports this in real cost and duration contribution.

Straightforward Analysis – Acumen Risk is user friendly with straightforward results and easy-to-understand visuals, helping you to truly understand your risk analysis.

Truly Integrated Cost and Schedule Risk – Cost risk exposure doesn’t occur in isolation of schedule risk. Acumen Risk provides an easy way to link schedule risk to cost risk so that you can determine the impact of schedule delays on your cost estimate.

Direct Schedule Integration – Acumen Risk works directly with the native scheduling tool eliminating the need to create separate high-level schedules.

Built-In Risk Register – Acumen Risk includes the ability to create a new risk register or import an existing risk register for use during risk analysis. This allows you to easily map risk events directly to the areas of the schedule they will impact for the most accurate picture of project risk.

Meaningful reports – Generate reports you can actually use. Acumen Risk includes all the reporting you need, automatically created in professional, ready-to-print format.

Project Diagnostics – Combine Acumen Risk with Acumen Fuse for seamless access, in a single platform, to all of the project diagnostics, scenario generation and schedule cleansing that comes with Deltek Acumen Fuse and Deltek Acumen 360 – a direct means of preparing your schedule for risk analysis.

Unrivaled performance – From input to reporting, Acumen Risk performs up to five times faster than current risk analysis software and includes access to Deltek’s reliable updates and product support.

Take the risk out of your next project.

“We have to manage our cost and schedule overruns, as anyone else does, with a high degree of confidence and understanding. Deltek Acumen Risk helps us produce a high quality product.”
Dean King
Project Risk Analyst, TransCanada
“The Deltek Acumen Suite has taken our project planning tools into a new era of analytic rigor.”
T. Horrillo
Program Manager, LLNL
What we found is that Acumen Risk fusing with Acumen Fuse was the best way for us to move forward and deliver high-quality reports. That has been really, really vital for us because we have a lot of very large schedules.”
A Functional Manager for Program Planning
Project Scheduling and Cost Controls, Ameren Transmission
“Acumen provides more than a report that tell us status - it provides a foundation to help us make a better action plan.”
Colin Thrift
Scheduling Executive, Gilbane Building Company
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