Customer Reviews

Practical Risk Assessment for Project Management

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The ideal audience for this book is relatively narrow, consisting of readers who meet the following two criteria: (1) new to risk management techniques, and (2) using Palisade @Risk. In fact, this book comes close to being a tutorial on using @Risk, which is a popular commercial product that works within Microsoft Excel and project management programs.

If you are new to advanced techniques in project risk management you'll like the way the author succinctly covers all of the key elements of project risk assessment, project finance forecasting, and simulation and modeling. Considering the complexity of the subject area, and the fact that both probability and simulation techniques are covered, the author does a remarkable job of conveying the wide range of topics in a scant 134 pages. I especially liked the generous use of graphs and examples, and the way each topic was broken down into easy-to-grasp facts and steps.

However, even without @Risk you can learn much about risk assessment from this book, including a refresher on probability distributions, how to perform an assessment using manual techniques, and modeling and simulation with an emphasis on Monte Carlo simulation.

The only problem I have with this book is that it's out of date with respect to @Risk, which has evolved into a much more capable tool since this book was first published 7 years ago. Since one of the this book's strengths is the way it teaches how to apply @Risk to real world project risk assessment, the fact that it's out of date with respect to the software version diminishes its value.

This book makes sense to IT project or very samll, simple and non-complex construction projects when more sophiscated and expensive analysis tools could not be afforded. For large Oil & Gas or mega construction projects, this book is somewhat misleading. I bought the book hoping to find a model which will help me analyze project cost estimate / schedule uncertainty, therefore establish the contingency as well as risk response plan, I was quite disappointed paying over $100 for this 140-page booklet.