Assessment of uploaded questions and responses

¶ … unfavorable uncertainty and a favorable uncertainty have on a project? Provide examples.

Uncertainties can have a positive or negative outcome on a project based on how they are initially assessed and managed. The type, level, and potential impact of uncertainties all are predicated on how well orchestrated and planned a project is from the initial phases of development (Brown, Hyer, 2010). The most common sources of uncertainty include financial, technical, the business environment, social and external or natural environment. Taken together, these factors are what hold projects back from being entirely perfect or flawless in their execution. Unfavorable uncertainties are often out of the control of the project manager and emanate either from organizational constraints or the external environment. An example is when a project is heavily reliant on outside funding, as many of the NASA and Department of Defense (DoD) projects are. When there is an abundance of funding available, this factors becoming a favorable uncertainty as there is significant upside potential for the project to gain even greater financial support. An unfavorable uncertainty would be what has become a reality for many of these projects: cut funding and a lack of support. An example of a favorable uncertainty is what Eli Lilly and Co. found with their drug Evista which initially was developed for birth control but was later found to be an excellent treatment for osteoporosis (Brown, Hyer, 2010).

Explain the possible benefits to using one of the simulation methods when assessing for possible project risks. Why is this method better for some projects than risk mapping, FMEA, the gut-feeling method, and the Delphi method?

Simulation methods give the project manager and their teams the ability to replicate all controllable aspects of a project before time is wasted and dollars spent. In this context the main benefit of using simulation methods is that they reduce risk, provide greater insight into how a given project, and provide the flexibility of replicating many different scenarios to see what the probable outcomes will be. In this way, project managers can use simulation methods to create a more effective risk reduction strategy and create more scenarios for managing good and bad contingencies as well.

Secondly, these simulation methods are useful for finding points of potential failure as the FMEA simulation approaches are pervasively used for today. Simulation models can also be used for assigning a financial measure to the level of project success or failure, the elapsed time of a project on project value (as earned value management does) and defining the value of a simulated project at a point in time. By using these simulation techniques project managers gain insights that would not otherwise be available (Brown, Hyer, 2010). In conclusion, simulation models are useful for seeing how the dimensions of a project's scope, schedule and resource constraints shift over time and continually deliver insights to project managers they would not otherwise would have had.

Explain why it is important to plan for uncertainties and how to implement a strategy to address possible risk factors.

All projects experience uncertainties over time, so planning for them is essential for any project's success (Brown, Hyer, 2010). Creating a series of scenarios and contingency plans for how to best manage uncertainty is often accomplished using simulation methods and models, in addition to creating alternative project plans based on known uncertainties at a project's uncertainties. Best practices in project management however is in being able to anticipate known uncertainties and at least interpolate or find methods for discovering unknown uncertainties (Brown, Hyer, 2010). Large-scale projects often use an uncertainty matrix to better manage the probabilities of each event and determine how each will impact the performance of the project plan over time (Brown, Hyer, 2010).

Strategies for managing for and anticipating uncertainties often include a variety of simulation methods in conjunction with quantifying their financial, operational and resource-based impact on a given project. Project teams of large-scale aerospace projects for example rely on the uncertainty matrix, intensive use of FMEA analysis and analytics and metrics to provide insights into how each could potentially impact project performance over time (Brown, Hyer, 2010). Taken together these approaches to managing uncertainty are often aggregated together into project-based reporting by project milestone to determine the status of known uncertainties and the emergence of unknown or unseen uncertainties.

What are the three risk dimensions a project team needs to address when assessing for project uncertainties? What are possible sources that can affect project uncertainty?