Practical proposals for managing uncertainty and risk in project planning

Standard planning techniques, such as PERT, and the popular software tools that support them are inadequate for projects involving uncertainty in the project direction and task durations. Probability distributions for task durations and generalized activity networks with probabilistic branching and looping have long been established as viable techniques to manage these project uncertainties. Unfortunately, their complexity has meant that their use in industry is minimal. This paper proposes extensions to existing software tools to specify and manage such uncertainties that would be easy to learn and use. A survey has shown that if these extensions were available, commercial and government organizations would regularly use them.