Name: Predictable Project Delivery Through Integrated Cost and Schedule Analysis
Uploaded: 2026-04-30T16:30:58.304Z
Duration: 36 min 52 s
Description: Predictable Project Delivery Through Integrated Cost and Schedule Analysis

Transcript for "Predictable Project Delivery Through Integrated Cost and Schedule Analysis": Hello, everyone. I'm Jared Maloney, senior solutions engineer for Deltek. Thank you for joining us for today's presentation. Before I get started, I do have a few administrative items to note. For the best webinar experience, please use Google Chrome. If you have any questions, please type them into the q and a box at any time during the presentation. We will address as many questions as possible at the conclusion of the webinar, and any questions left unanswered will be addressed individually offline following today's presentation. Resources, including the presentation slides, are available for you to download in the resource tab on your screen. You also receive the on demand recording of today's webinar via email within twenty four hours after the webinar ends. So with that, let's go ahead and get started. Today's topic is predictable project delivery through integrated cost and schedule analysis. And what we mean by that is we're gonna walk through the process of importing both schedule data and cost data and running Monte Carlo risk on those and integrating the two so that you can get an idea of how one might impact, the other. I've listed here a little bit of an outline of the flow that I'll use as I I walk through the presentation. We'll we'll pull in that data, show you how you can set up the risk model and how you can tie those two together. So with that said, I'm gonna go ahead and toggle over into the software here. To to set this up, I've gone ahead and imported a a schedule as well as, some cost data that I imported through Excel. Now it's important to note, you can pull this in in in various, different formats. So the schedule can be in our own open plan scheduling tool, p six, Microsoft Project. All of those work, just fine with Acumen. You can also take a cost loaded schedule and create the cost model from the schedule if you choose. In this case, I've gone in and just imported an Excel, template that I'm gonna use for for today. All you really need in the Excel data in order to get that information in is some sort of column that has remaining cost along with some descriptions of those cost items so that you have, something to link the risk that you're trying to account for into the model. But it's a a pretty bare requirement in terms of getting that data in and being able to run risk on cost information. So our first step of the process here is really gonna be, number one, to make sure that we are working with with data that is worthwhile for us to take the time and actually come in and, you know, run risk against this this particular schedule in this case. Now there's a few ways to do that within Acumen. I'm gonna go ahead and just toggle over to diagnostics where we do all of our schedule quality checks. And there's a number of metrics that I tend to look at as a a precursor to running a risk, analysis on the schedule. So I just kinda honed in on the schedule. By default, it's looking at our schedule quality metrics, which are the first ones that you see when you launch the software. The key ones for risk that I'm gonna focus on, typically, you're gonna be making sure that the logic is is present. In this case, I do have a few items with missing logic, making sure that there aren't constraints that might be holding this model in. I would probably address these particular, two issues first before progressing. I might also wanna look at merge hot spots where there are situations where I have a high number of predecessors that are leading into an activity that that might create a bottleneck of sorts. Those things that I wanna be aware of. In addition, you know, with Acumen, you've got a a whole host of of metrics that you can run this against, including your own that you may have created. I would probably add open ends to this, particular grouping if it was a risk preparation. But there's a a whole, you know, different menu down here, broken out into different schedule characteristics that you can utilize to make sure that the schedule is sound before you take the time to map in risks and, you know, try to let that that be your guide. In addition, I will note over in the import screen here, there are a couple of things that you can do through automated processes within Acumen. It will never override the schedule you've imported, but you can create a copy of it and basically use that in a sandbox to run the risk model. So if I wanted to use some of these automated processes to do things like remove the constraints, for example, I could turn those on and create a copy of the schedule that does not include those constraints, which may particularly may hold the model in when we run this. So just some things to be aware of as you prepare the schedule. Being able to do all that within the single tool here of Acumen and making sure that the the schedule's sound before you, you know, undertake the the time consuming effort that it may be to to link the risks is important to know what's gonna drive those results and make sure that you're gonna get meaningful results out of the process. That said, for what we're doing today, we'll just assume that my my schedule is good enough to go ahead and run risk on, and we'll we'll toggle over to the the risk tab. And we'll start with how we approach, uncertainty ranges. Now when we do this on we're gonna do this for both schedule and cost. You can see I've got these grouped under a shared risk register. So I am using, the same risk register for each. So when I go, you know, map those in, I I don't have to pull in different risk registers. I can just use the same one. I do have two different line items here for schedule and cost. Right now, they are independent of one another. So I can set this up, Ron and Monte Carlo, on either one individually. And then I'll also walk you through the process of linking those as we progress through the presentation here. So I'll start with schedule. Let's just click on my, my schedule that I've imported here, and let's clear out the risk register. So let's go full screen. You can see my my schedule that we're working with here. And we've got a a tab here for duration uncertainty. So this is where we're going to set our three point estimates. And this is just gonna be general uncertainty. So not, the discrete risk that we're gonna pull from a risk register, but just that general variance that might occur as you progress through, these activities that are listed in the schedule. So I'm gonna pull over my minimum, most likely, and max duration columns so we can see those here. And we'll talk a little bit about these sliders that you see in the middle of the screen. I'll use this activity, highlighted on the screen here because it's got a nice ten day remaining duration. Makes the math nice and simple to see here. As we move the slider to yellow, for example, which is right in the middle, that's gonna be a 10% variance by default either direction, and you see that play out with nine, ten, 11. Now, you do have full control over those percentages. There's a template here that you just saw me open. Here's that 10% variance that I was referring to. You can change these numbers to whatever fits your needs. So if you have historical data you want to align with, to make these uncertainty ranges more accurate, you can certainly do that. You can save those as templates and use those going forward. But one of the things that we've we've found is being able to utilize these sliders to set the uncertainty ranges can be a big time saver, as you go throughout the process and avoids the the the problem of of when you just get into droning out numbers that may or may not end up being meaningful in these larger schedules. Also avoids the need to create summary schedules. As you can see me move these here, these do work, top down within the hierarchy. So if I wanna do this at a higher level of the schedule, I can, you know, look, group this however I choose and maybe just move these at a higher level so that I don't have to go to the granular activity by activity view, that I was showing you before. If I do go into a lower level and move one that's, say, activity specific, that will hold its place even if I go back up to the top and move it. So anything I've done at a greater level of detail will remain in place as we as we progress throughout this process. I will also note, you know, I've got this grouped by WBS, but you can group this by anything that's in the schedule. So any activity code, any field that you've got, that that's a part of that schedule, I can come in and group this. And let's just say I've got, for example, I've got one in here for location, I believe. It's just an activity code in the sample schedule that I loaded. If I were to switch that over to location, now instead of grouping this by my, WBS elements, I've got this grouped by my locations. In this case, these four. So if I wanted to set uncertainty ranges and or map in discrete risk using that, I can do that here. I'm gonna use WBS for a bulk of what I'm doing, for the walk through today, but just wanted to point that out as we as we look at these. So now in addition to the uncertainty ranges, the other primary, factor that's going to impact the models is going to be the risk register. Now I've gone ahead and imported a risk register just for the sake of time, but I will also walk you through, some ways that you can create your own risk registers and some of the new features that we've put in in recent Acumen releases. So, you know, for those of you who are current Acumen users, the some of the things I'm about to show you are only available in eight dot 11, so I highly recommend that you upgrade to that if you're on an older version. We have put in some new AI capability that allows you to build out the risk register through suggestions, based on prompts that that you provided. So if you're looking for ways to kinda brainstorm the risks that could potentially impact your project, you can come in, and I'll I'll show you how it works here, and can and and alongside what I've already imported. If I want to generate risks with AI, I just click that button. Now one thing I do wanna point out as I go through this process, this does not share any of the data that you've imported into Acumen with AI. The only thing that pushes to the AI is what I'm typing on this this pop up window that you see here. So it's gonna ask you for a project, type. And I'll go ahead and just kinda use an example here. Let's say we've got a drop down, where we can select, And you can type in whatever you choose there, or you can have it, make suggestions. But I'll just say, for example, we'll call it transportation. And it will ask you what location that's gonna utilize that for the suggestions. In my case, I'm gonna do I I live here in Texas, so I'm gonna use my my dream of a light rail system running from Dallas to Houston to San Antonio. So let's plug in those three, locations here. We'll just say San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas. And then you're you have an an option here to type in any additional notes that you'd like to add, you know, descriptions of the projects, things to consider. I'm just gonna type in light rail system running from San Antonio to Houston to Dallas. And then you can give it additional guidance. I'll just, will say, please take into consideration. Let's just say environmental clearances, land ownership, and geological considerations. Now you can type as much information as you want here. I'll just go ahead and, we'll stop on that one there. And when I hit generate, it's then going to run that, through the AI that I've pointed it to and given that information. And we widen out the screen so you can see the results here. You can see each of these risks is either specific to one of those locations or it might, you know, encounter all three of those. Just widen this out so you can read the risk suggestions here. And, basically, it's gone through, and all of these with this little purple icon next to them are the ones that were AI suggested, potential risks. There's one major public event in Houston causing construction delays. You can see some of these are gonna be, you know, pertain to each location. Some of them are gonna be specific to one or the other. Delay penalty for missing completion date. Availability of federal funding and senators for transportation projects, That's gonna be in there as as an opportunity. So it will make suggestions of both risks and opportunities. In addition to being able to utilize this to build out the risk register, You can also use it to get suggestions for mitigation steps for how you may wish to, you know, may wish to address some of these. So if we were to look at let me pick one that's actually a a threat here. Let's just say land disputes in San Antonio. And if we were to generate mitigation steps, I can then ask it, okay. Well, that's that's a a risk that we want to explore further. Maybe make some suggestions of how we might limit the impact of that and or avoid it altogether. You can see it came up here with eight different suggestions of things that we might want to consider doing if we wish to mitigate that risk. Now you'll note we do put that little icon there so that the user knows it hasn't been touched by a human yet. That's just a suggestion that came from the AI. You can, you know, delete those. Or if I were to make adjustments to them, if I plug in a probability, you'll see that icon go away, which indicates that a human has has looked at that and decided we do wanna make it a part of this particular model. So, just a couple of new features that are in the latest version of Acumen that are there really to help you, you know, build out the risk register and come up with, potential ideas to avoid some of the risks that that either are suggested by the AI or or your own risk that you've already got in the, you know, in your risk register there. So let's take the one I have here. I'm gonna go ahead and map in a few of these. I think I I mapped in a couple ahead of time just for the sake of time. But to to do the mapping, we basically just select the risks that we want. Let's take risk one here, for example, and we select the area of the schedule that it's gonna impact. Here's we'll just say this early design grouping. When I click that map button, you'll see it'll populate those. The impacts and the probabilities, those values are all coming from my risk register. So in this case, this customs delays risk had a probability range of of 50 to 75% chance of occurrence, and the impact was was listed as high for both schedule and cost. Now that can that can mean whatever you choose for it too. This is just the value that I had assigned to high in my risk register. There is a template similar to what I showed you earlier with the uncertainty template that allows you to set those values and ranges accordingly. Here's the probability ones. Here are the impacts for both schedule and cost. You can also do them percent based, on any individual risk. For for some of you may be on older versions, you used to have to select to either do a percentage on all or none. Now you'll notice there is a little column next to schedule and cost. If you wanna do one of these by percentage, but leave the rest in absolute values, you can just check that box. I've done it for for one of these as I set this up. Now I've been doing all of this just on the schedule for the cost data. It's the same basic process to get the model set up. If I want to toggle over to my cost information here, for example, I simply click on that, that cost data that I've imported, and I can then come in. I've I've gone ahead and set up some mappings, but the uncertainty is gonna work very similar to what I showed you earlier with schedule. You can see right now none of them were selected. It'll just kinda put them in the middle for what I'm doing in in today's presentation. But you can go through and set those just like I did for, for the schedule data on cost. And, again, right now, these are sharing a risk register, but the models themselves are not linked. Now the way we will do that when we get to that that that part of it, there is a little icon here for, that you can that you can use to put overlay of the the risks that occur on the schedule that you wish to potentially impact cost. Now, typically, you don't wanna do that as a a blanket across the board because there may be costs that are, that are fixed costs that aren't going to be affected by a delay, and there's other ones that that will. So I typically would recommend, you know, if you use this, you're gonna want to kinda select which groupings of the cost data align with which portions of the schedule in terms of, hey. If this part gets delayed, will it actually drive additional cost for us, or was that perhaps a fixed cost? So we'll get a a little bit further into that here in a moment, but let's go ahead and run our first pass of these, these these ones that we've set up for scheduling costs, and then I'll show you how you can link the two. So let's start with schedule. I'm gonna toggle back over to that one, and we're gonna tell it to go ahead and run its first pass at it based on the information that I've provided. So it's gonna do a thousand iterations, and let's go ahead and widen the results out and talk about some of the reporting that you can expect to get out of this, whether it's, you know, from each individual one or where where you've linked. I'm gonna pull this up to the project finish date, and let's add a little marker. We'll talk a little bit about the distribution chart, which is just the the first one we're gonna see here. This is the range of outcomes. So in this case, these were the range of finish dates. I added a deterministic goal in the schedule of 07/30/2029. Looks like my best case was about a month off of that, in any of the iterations. And if we look at it, I I've got my default set to view this at 80 percentile. So p 80, meaning 80% of the time we finished on or before this date. So out of my thousand iterations, the eight hundredth one, if I sorted it by finish date, finished on 03/01/2030. So we're looking at about a two hundred and fourteen day impact based on those risks and uncertainty inputs that I provided it. Now that gives us the the what, but to where we really want to dive deeper is the why. What caused the delays that we're seeing? To do that, I'm going to look at the risk events that contributed the most to that February impact. So let's widen this one out where we can see these a little better. We can see risk seven here, for example, at the top having a a pretty significant impact along with risk 10. So the goal here really is to get an idea of where mitigation is best applicable. You know, we we see some of these down here at the bottom that are having six, seven days. They're not going to, probably be our our area of focus if we can, you know, mitigate these that we see at the top here and really focus on on those two in this particular example as ones that we wanna target with any mitigation strategies that we may have. Now I can go in and apply mitigation, rerun this model. So let's just take let's take risk seven, for example. Let's say maybe I do have some sort of mitigation plan for that. We'll come into risk seven, and we'll turn on mitigation. In fact, let's just turn on mitigation steps. We'll ask the AI to give us some suggestions of things that that might help with that particular, risk. And let's just say we wanna go with the first one, and we'll leave it as a as a single step. We'll say maybe that pushes it from very high down to to medium or low impact for these. And let's rerun it with that applied using our suggested mitigation step there. And when I rerun this, we would expect to see, hopefully, some impact pulling it back, at least closer to being on track, which is what we what we tend to see there. I could add these to a comparison and compare the scenarios. But, really, what I'm gonna look at primarily here for today is the risk drivers and viewing what that did to risk seven. So here's risk seven, for example. It's still on the board. It's down here, though, with these other, you know, six, seven, eight day type risk that we had. We can compare these, different versions as well. So if we had, you know, perhaps unintended consequences of applying that mitigation step, I can now, compare those. Let me just rerun one without mitigation so that I have that, that comparison point saved. And here was the version with risk seven at the top. So add that into our comparison, and then we can compare the two there. So if we wanna view those, I will go into my panel here. We'll go to risk driver comparison, and we'll toggle it to risk events. So we can see here risk seven, pretty clear visual here, right, of the originally fifty six days down to nine. You can see how it impacted all of the other risks that were in this particular grouping for the tornado chart. Now most of these are are pretty even. If I had set these up to run the risks in parallel, which you can definitely do within the the tool, you know, we might have seen some some other variants that could impact the model in a a few different ways. So, just something to be aware of there. You can run, the the mappings for risk in serial or parallel or parallel, however you decide to set that up. We can also look at different critical paths that occurred, through each of our models. I loaded a pretty basic sample schedule, so just a couple of different options there. But, we can view where, you know, different critical paths may have, cropped up as we were doing this process. Now we've looked at the the schedule data. We've seen which risks are causing us the most delay in the schedule. Let's also take a look at our cost data and see which ones are creating the most problem for us from the on the cost side of things. So let's toggle there, and we'll go ahead and run the model independent on cost first, and then we'll link the two and kinda tie these together. So we're gonna go ahead and run it as is first. Let's go to the top layer. We're gonna have similar, you know, type of reporting, of course. Biggest differences, these are gonna be, of course, dollars as opposed to durations. So we were looking at, in this case, at that 80 percentile just like we did in the scheduled version. I'm looking at about a $17,000,000 impact of the uncertainty ranges, which I kinda just set down the middle along with whatever risks I mapped in, that that I pulled in from my imported, Excel sheet there. So to see what those are, we would go over to the risk drivers here, for example, and we'll go to risk events just like we did for the schedule. And I'm actually gonna go in and just make this a single view so we can read those numbers pretty easily here. Risk 10, was our main culprit on schedule. Also, it looks like our problem child on cost having a $5,000,000 contribution towards that 17,000,000 that we see there. You can see each of the risks that are, you know, contributing to that value that we're we're seeing on that screen. So, we can get kind of a a different chart for for schedule and a different one for cost. Now if we want to go ahead and take the additional step to link these together, we can do what I was showing a little bit of a preview of earlier, and we select the section that we wanna group. Let's just take our construction grouping of our cost data. And let's say I want to go ahead and align that with the construction portion of my schedule. Now I can get more granular and do this activity by activity, pick specific ones that would drive delays, certainly, but let's just go ahead and do all of construction in this case. You can see it'll do it at that that higher level. I I can then rerun this, and I can see what that's gonna do because what that'll do is it'll take the delay that I had in the construction portion of the the schedule risk analysis, and it will then have it override cost with the ranges that occurred based on my scheduled delay impact. So, when we go over to our cost data here let me just toggle over, and I'll show you where those those ranges come into play. So here's our construction. Here are our three point, ranges that we have, initially. So in this case, here's our our overlay that's coming from the schedule. So in these ranges are coming in at 95% on the minimum, 127% on the max. Those numbers are are being driven by the results of our construction portion of the the schedule, analysis that we did. So when we run this now and we look at the overall picture, let's see how it impacted it, and we'll go to the distribution. So that fairly minimal impact, but I think we were just below 17,000,000 before. We were at about sixteen eight or nine, I believe, and now we're at 17.6. And the difference that drove that is because I linked this to my schedule and told it that those construction impacts were potentially going to also cause us, issues with the construction portion of our cost. Now one other thing that you can do as a part of this is you can link specific activities to certain, cost items. Let's just take I'm gonna try to find one that matches up here. Let's just take one of these construction ones because I I think some of these, align pretty well. Let's take activity or this this $9.51 here. Now I can come in and link this to let's pick an activity under construction. We'll just take this electrical activity. It's a forty day. So now that I've linked that to a specific activity, I could then come in to my risk register, and we've created a new type of risk that you can use that will allow you to define what that impact is. So I'm gonna go ahead and generate a new manual risk, and I'm gonna tell it to do a a delay penalty risk. So this allows me to then take the activity that I selected, which was electrical in construction. So let me just look at the, the current date on that because it is gonna ask me to give it a a date that it that it can't pass before this penalty kicks in. So let's toggle over to the schedule here real quick, and we will look at construction. And I believe it was this electrical activity right here, which currently has a forty day duration. Let me just scroll over and see finish date set for 10/30/2028. So let's go back over to the cost risk and the one that we've aligned that to and tell it if it goes beyond that date, it's going to then have an impact that we can define. So when we go in here, we can say this can't go beyond October. I'm gonna say we'll say twenty eighth. And if it does, you know, I can make this whatever I want. Let's just say for this example, it's gonna cost us $25,000 every day that it goes over that particular one, and then I can map it to this this particular cost item that I've got. And then when I rerun this based on my delays that were driven by the activity that I selected, you can see that number just jumped about 3,000,000, and I picked it to do a pretty significant 25,000, daily impact. So that's how you can not only integrate the cost and schedule just by the the general, results of your scheduled data. But you can even go in and now define specific items that if they go over certain dates, you know what that penalty is. You can plug that in and have that reflected in the model as well. The last thing I'll note here, I know I'm a little bit over time, with the within Acumen, if you want to create a risk adjusted schedule and export it out, that's another thing that you can do within the tool. So if I, you know, like what I've done here and I want to view this in other, other tools or just export it out, I can build out a a model where I tell it what confidence level I wanna use for each of my durations, And I can then generate a scenario, where I would export it back out, and I can export that out as, you know, any of the file formats that you you wish to do within Acumen, whether that's Microsoft Project, p six, our own open plan, any of the formats that are available for export. So just be aware that if you wanna create those, confidence level scenarios, you can export those back out as well. So with that said, I know we're a little bit over time, so I will open it up for q and a, maybe address a couple of questions if I can. And then, you know, any we don't get to, we'll certainly cover offline. Okay. At this time, before we dive into our questions, we're just gonna pause for a second and have everyone answer our polling question for today. So we are gonna open the poll here and, ask everyone, would you like to be contacted by a sales representative to see how Deltek PPM can help you achieve approved levels of project success? We'll just give it a second here and allow everyone a chance to answer the poll. Pause for just a couple more seconds here. Alright. So at this time, Jared, I think you can go ahead and take our first question. Okay. Sounds great. Yeah. I know we're a little bit over. We do have a few questions here, so I'll I'll take a couple. And then any we don't get to, we'll we'll follow-up offline. The first one I see here was, if my schedule's cost loaded, can I run risk on that same file or for both the the schedule and cost results? The answer is is sort of. So you you can create the the cost model from your cost loaded schedule. So in the, walk through, I imported that data through Excel. If the schedule does happen to be cost loaded, there is a button, that allows you to create that cost model, and you can align it with the work breakdown structure of the schedule as well. So you can definitely use that data to, to generate that. Another question here. I'm just scrolling through a couple of these. And I've got one that says, can you integrate a scheduled development p six and a risk model developed in Excel using Acumen. You could definitely pull in the in fact, in the example I used, the schedule I pulled in was from Primavera p six. For the risk model developed in Excel, I'd have to look at the format. So I'll probably follow-up with you offline on that one. You can have the risk register in Excel and pull that in along with the link. So, you can you can definitely set it up in that way. It's just a matter of understanding the data and the format that it's in. We'll go ahead and do one more here. Here's a question about the the AI being used, asking what what AI tool is being used for the the risk register, function, and is my project data being shared to it, which is a a good question. The answer to the first part is you can, it it the one I'm using in there is Azure AI. You can point it to your own LLM as well and utilize that to to generate those risk register suggestions. As far as what's being shared, in the walk through when there was a little pop up window where I typed in that prompt, that is actually all that's shared. So it doesn't share out any of your schedule data. For for security purposes, we kept it to just that pop up window where you give it the guidance of what you're looking for and let it make suggestions based on the information that you've provided. So, I know we're a couple minutes over, so I will go ahead and stop with the live quest q and a portion there. Any that we didn't get to, though, I will reach out, following the webinar and and address any additional questions. So, Lisa, I'll pass it back over to you. Alright. Sounds great. Before we officially conclude, we want to remind you that you will receive an on demand recording of today's webinar via email within twenty four hours. And as Jared said, if we weren't able to get to your question today, we'll be sure to follow-up with you directly offline. And with that with that, I'd like to thank you for joining us today. Please visit deltek.com for more upcoming Deltek events. Have a great rest of your day.