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From schedule to value: quantitative project risk analysis with AI agents

With Fernando Hernández. Seven two-hour sessions to build, simulate and defend to your sponsor a Monte Carlo model of your own project.

  1. Tue20Oct
  2. Thu22Oct
  3. Tue27Oct
  4. Thu29Oct
  5. Thu5Nov
  6. Tue10Nov
  7. Thu12Nov
7 sessions · 14 hours12:00–14:00 New York · 17:00–19:00 London · 09:00–11:00 Los Angeles
  • ✓ 7 live sessions on Zoom, and their recordings
  • ✓ 3 months of the Professional licence: the simulator, the AI agents, the 75-lesson recorded course and its downloadable materials · What's in it?
  • ✓ The example project and a template for your own project

US$240US$340

Launch price until 9 October

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By the end you will be able to

  • ✓Explain why a single-point date and budget are almost always optimistic, and what it means to commit at P80 or P90.
  • ✓Turn a real schedule into a probabilistic network with three-point estimates, links with lags, constraints and a working calendar.
  • ✓Model fixed and duration-driven variable costs, and a risk register quantified by frequency and severity.
  • ✓Run and interpret a Monte Carlo simulation: S-curves, criticality, tornadoes and the risk horizon.
  • ✓Size schedule and cost contingency, and the joint confidence of meeting the date and the budget at the same time.
  • ✓Value mitigation strategies by comparing inherent and residual risk, and present the recommendation to the sponsor.
  • ✓Extend the model to Level 2 (objectives, stakeholders and gates) and estimate the probability that the project delivers the value it was approved for, as the PMBOK Guide, Eighth Edition, proposes.
  • ✓Work with iziRisk’s AI agents, which build a model from a description, propose distributions and correlations and interpret the results, and review what they propose with judgement.

Who it is for

Project managers, PMOs, planners, cost engineers, controllers and risk analysts. Also banking and insurance teams who assess other people’s projects.

Prerequisites

Experience with a schedule (MS Project, Primavera or Excel) and basic Excel. No advanced statistics needed.

Includes

  • 7 live sessions on Zoom, and their recordings.
  • 3 months of the Professional licence: the simulator, the AI agents, the 75-lesson recorded course and its downloadable materials.
    › What's in it?

    Schedule and cost simulation

    • The course’s full simulator, with unlimited simulations.
    • Correlations and common causes between tasks, costs and risks (locked on the Student account).
    • Risk mitigation: inherent versus residual risk analysis (locked on the Student account).
    • Level 2 (objectives, stakeholders and value), with correlated objectives and unlimited saved projects (one on the Student account).
    • The iziRisk Quantum Excel add-in with up to 50,000 iterations per simulation, distribution fitting and a correlation matrix.

    AI agents

    • Build a complete schedule and cost model from a description, with export to MS Project.
    • Build Excel Monte Carlo models and turn a deterministic Excel model into a probabilistic one (“Just iziRisk it!”).
    • Suggest distributions and correlations, drawing on the iziRisk knowledge base.
    • Interpret the results of every simulation and explain them in plain language.
    • At Level 2, propose the objectives your project is judged by (“Define success”) and draft the executive summary for the sponsor.
    • Generous use: dozens of builds and over a hundred analyses a month, against a few in total on the Student account.

    Courses and materials

    • The full 75-lesson recorded course, to revisit any topic after the sessions.
    • Unlimited downloads of course materials: PDFs, workbooks and resources.

    Experts

    • The “Ask the Expert” AI chat, answered from indexed expert content.
    • Up to 30 questions a month to human experts.
    See the full Professional plan →
  • The example project and a template for your own project.
  • Certificate of 14 hours of training, which you can use to claim PDUs with PMI.

Minimum 8, maximum 25 participants.

Dates and times · 7 sessions, 14 hours

  1. SESSION 1

    Tuesday 20 October

    12:00–14:00 New York

    Why the plan lies: uncertainty, Monte Carlo and distributions

    • Optimism bias and the problem with a single date.
    • Monte Carlo explained without formulas.
    • PERT, triangular and uniform: when to use each.
    • P50, P80 and P90: what committing to a percentile means.
    • What iziRisk’s AI agents do in risk analysis: build, suggest and interpret.

    Hands-on: The example project, a first model built by the AI agent from a description, and your first S-curve.

  2. SESSION 2

    Thursday 22 October

    12:00–14:00 New York

    The probabilistic schedule

    • The task network and the critical path.
    • FS, SS, FF and SF links with lags, in working days.
    • Constraints, deadlines and the working calendar.
    • How to get three-point estimates from the experts. The dynamic Gantt.
    • The AI agent that builds the schedule and cost from a description and exports them to MS Project.

    Hands-on: Build the network, or import your own MS Project schedule.

  3. SESSION 3

    Tuesday 27 October

    12:00–14:00 New York

    Costs and the risk register

    • Fixed and per-day variable costs: how schedule risk becomes cost risk.
    • Frequency times severity: why they are convolved rather than averages multiplied.
    • Poisson, Bernoulli and binomial. Activity risks and cross-cutting risks.
    • How to write a risk that can be quantified.
    • AI-suggested distributions and correlations: how to review them before accepting them.

    Hands-on: A register of 8 to 10 risks for the project.

  4. SESSION 4

    Thursday 29 October

    12:00–14:00 New York

    Running and interpreting the simulation

    • Deterministic, probabilistic and probabilistic-with-risks scenarios.
    • Iterations, Latin Hypercube and reproducibility.
    • S-curves, histograms and the criticality index.
    • Tornadoes by correlation and by exclusion. The risk horizon.
    • The agent that interprets the results: what it reads well, where it can be wrong and how to check it.

    Hands-on: Find the three risks that move the date and the cost the most.

  5. SESSION 5

    Thursday 5 November

    12:00–14:00 New York

    Contingency and mitigation

    • Schedule and cost contingency from the percentiles.
    • Joint confidence: the probability of meeting the date and the budget at the same time.
    • Mitigation strategies: inherent versus residual risk.
    • What mitigation is worth: the cost of the response against the exposure avoided.

    Hands-on: A mitigation plan with its cost and its effect on the P80.

  6. SESSION 6

    Tuesday 10 November

    12:00–14:00 New York

    Level 2: from schedule and cost to the project’s value

    The PMBOK Guide, Eighth Edition, places scope, schedule and cost inside value delivery: they remain performance domains, but a project can meet all three and still fail. In this session we turn that idea into numbers: the probability that your project delivers the value it was approved for, and who would be dissatisfied if it does not.

    • The performance domains of the PMBOK Guide (8th edition) and value delivery.
    • Objectives from the standard catalogue, their KPIs and targets. Gates: the objective no other can make up for.
    • Stakeholders: importance, influence and the expectations matrix.
    • Risks and opportunities that affect several objectives at once.
    • Probability of success, Value Index, PVaR and value shortfall.
    • The “Define success” AI agent and the Level 2 executive summary.

    Hands-on: Extend the course project to Level 2 and find which objective limits its success.

  7. SESSION 7

    Thursday 12 November

    12:00–14:00 New York

    Deciding, reporting and presenting to the sponsor

    • What to report, what not to, and how to tell it to the person who decides.
    • The most common mistakes in project risk models.
    • AI as help to draft the report, without handing it the judgement.
    • Clinic: volunteers present their model and get feedback.
    • Wrap-up, next steps and certificates.

    Hands-on: The one-page summary for your project’s sponsor.

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