My risk analyser software (no brand name yet) is a tool meant for people working on any kind of engineering project. The software is able to create a possibility tree from different project outcomes and calculate project success probabilities according to specified metrics.

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For who risk analyser is made for?

The risk analyser helps all kinds of interested parties working on engineering project:

  • It helps engineers to better communicate risks inherent in specific decisions made during project development and visualize their impact on project success probability
  • It helps project managers to keep customers updated on project progress. It also helps with creating project budgeting by presenting predictions for project time table and work amount required (with safety margins)
  • It helps customers to see, how likely it is that project is going to achieve it’s targets, whether measured by time table, budget, work amount or some custom metric. Target metrics can be freely customized.

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Story

The risk analyser grew out of my experiences in software industry. I’ve been in numerous software projects that have left all parties involved wanting when it comes to perceived project outcome and whether it could be considered a successful project or not.

Later I saw how unfortunate decisions made in Länsimetro metro project in Finland caused the project to miss it’s goals in several metrics, including budget and passenger capacity. I started to research the project and saw documentation how several key decisions were made without adequate risk analysis.

This strengthened my conviction that risk management in software projects is lacking some very specific understanding and know how to model different project outcome scenarios and how different outcomes could be calculated in aggregate in order to make better decisions during project design and planning phase.

So I developed a method to predict project risks and present them in numerical and categorical form. This prediction model is well suited for internal project evaluation and most importantly presentation to customers. The overall goal of the tool is to improve communication of risks and status of engineering projects between all parties.

Features

In addition to risk analysis functionality, tool includes project progress tracking functionality in order to keep the risk analysis updated during project. These functions combined create a tool where all interested parties can get a quick look about how likely a project is to meet it’s defined goals, what is ready and what still needs to be done.

I think it’s something quite unique in engineering project management world. I’ve built a working demo of the software and it can be tried online at https://tikkasoftware.com/riskcalculator.

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