A Beginner's Path to Probabilistic Project Scheduling

This presentation is targeted to project professionals who are interested in exploring how to create a probabilistic schedule, but may not know where to start, or what the benefits are from creating and using a probabilistic schedule.

William will share how he successfully used nothing more than Microsoft Excel and a pre-built, freely-licensed spreadsheet called Statistical PERT to create a 10-month schedule at the activity level for a major upgrade of his employer's enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.

Interestingly, this probabilistic approach to scheduling doesn't use Monte Carlo simulation but can approximate the result from a Monte Carlo simulation. Even better, the pre-built Excel spreadsheet hides the complexity of using Excel's statistical functions so you can focus on getting good scheduling information from your subject matter experts.

Learning objectives:

• Understand how to model task/activity schedule uncertainty
• Create a simple probabilistic project schedule using only Excel
• Understand how to right-size a schedule buffer
• Create a right-size schedule buffer for any project