Event Chain Methodology

[kmckinley]

You spent a lot of time and effort creating a well-balanced project schedule. However, as soon as you implemented your project plan, something occurs and your schedule became obsolete. This “something” is an unpredictable event or risk.

Event Chain Methodology is a method to model uncertainties for different time-related business and technological processes including project management. It is based on existing analysis methodologies including: Monte Carlo simulation, Bayesian approach, and others.

Event Chain Methodology helps to answer the question: what happens to the schedule when a risk or event occurs. Event Chain Methodology allows you to capture and analyze the cumulative affect of these events or chain of events on the project schedule.

Event Chain Methodology is based on the following major principles.

1. Probabilistic Moment of Risk: An activity (task) in most real life processes is not a continuous uniform process. Tasks are affected by external events, which can occur at some point in the middle of the task.

2. Event Chains: Events can cause other events, which will create event chains. These event chains can significantly affect the course of the project. Quantitative analysis is used to determine a cumulative effect of these event chains on the project schedule.

3. Critical Events or Event Chains: The single events or the event chains that have the most potential to affect the projects are the “critical events” or “critical chains of events.” They can be determined by the analysis.

4. History Matching and Relevance Analysis: Probability and outcomes of the events can be obtained from historical data based on previous similar projects. Relevance analysis can be performed to select most appropriate risks for the project based on combination manager’s belief and historical evidence.

5. Project Tracking with Events: If project is practically completed and data about the project duration, cost, and events occurred is available, it is possible to refine information about future potential events and helps to forecast future project performance.

6. Event Chain Visualization: Events and event chains can be visualized using event chain diagrams on a Gantt chart.

7. Risk Mitigation with Event Chains: If an event or event chain occurs, it can trigger the execution of a mitigation plan. Mitigation plans will be embedded in the project schedule. However, mitigation plans can also be affected by events; therefore, the master project schedule with all possible mitigation plans will be analyzed together.

You can find more information about Event Chain Methodology at:
[URL="http://www.intaver.com/index-5.html"]http://www.intaver.com/index-5.html[/URL]

Ken McKinley
[URL="http://www.intaver.com"]http://www.intaver.com[/URL]

[michaelmz]

We all like to think that the dreaded "unforeseen circumstance" won't happen to use. Chances are it will come up at sometime in your career as a PM. How we handle that will determine just how great of a PM we really are.