How to Run a Risk Analysis (QSRA) with AI

00:01 So, now I’ve told you how the system is exactly the same as what you used in the past. Let me tell you how it’s completely different. Number one, it has artificial intelligence. Specifically, it has machine learning, as evidenced in this column that suggests uncertainty distributions and likely duration. This is a twenty-day duration activity, and the machine learning is suggesting twenty-two. I can turn it off and turn it on like so. Number two, it’s fully integrated into the rest of the system. This means that whenever a schedule is uploaded,
00:35 you have access to run a QSRA like this. Number three, it’s got special automations running throughout. So, this button up here takes all of the settings, uncertainty, and risk from a previous schedule that you can set and automatically imports them into your current schedule. This means you’re not sitting there clicking on updates where you’re transferring exactly the same settings across to see how things have changed. It’s now a single button click, and it’s done for you. And the fourth thing is that it’s fast,
01:08 really fast. We are on the cloud, and we leverage the fastest computing chips that we possibly can. We have clocked a fifty-thousand-line schedule running the QSRA at less than five minutes. So, with that, enjoy.

00:01 So now it’s time to start inputting the settings for our QSRA, and we start with uncertainty templates. So, at the top here, if you click on this button, you are able to set the templates for minimum, probable, and maximum duration. We can choose the percentages here. We can also choose the distribution, what you would like, either triangle or uniform. And what happens is that when you set those, you can start adjusting these settings naturally. So, I can change how the distribution of uncertainty is on these events. This is if you do not want to use bespoke
00:41 measures. So, you input the data yourself, and if you do not want to use the artificial intelligence, the choice is yours.

00:01 Now that we’ve set our templates, we can choose our uncertainty measures, and you have three options here. You can choose to go with the artificial intelligence, at which point you just click this button here, and it will change the minimum, probable, and maximum uncertainty. You can choose to go with one of your templates, where we just click the template we want here, or we can choose to program it ourselves. So, for example, this twenty-day activity has a minimum at the moment of seventeen; I can just change that to fifteen and press enter.
00:35 This blue arrow means that this has been customized. I can also change the distribution, so I can change it, for example, to a uniform distribution. What you can additionally do as well is, if you want to set the settings of a bulk of activities, you can click this “inherit from WBS” button. So, what that would mean is, if you go to the level above, for example, in this case, it would be preliminaries, then anything below that has this button clicked, and we can bulk click these buttons, we’ll automatically have all of their settings adjusted. You see
01:11 here how this one’s flicking this way. You can do thousands of activities at a time. Finally, there is a way to filter, and this is a personal favorite of mine because what I would like to do is do a bulk template for the majority of activities, but for the activities that are within, let’s say, twenty days of total float of the critical path, I just put twenty in here, press enter, it will show me all of these, and I go into those, and that is what I personally run my risk workshops against. Now, if we click on “clear filters” here,
01:49 you can see that the number of filters that you can play with, and these are for both uncertainty and risk events. You can do task information like ID, name, start, duration; you can start searching the webs; you can look at flow, and you can isolate it by risk events. To clear settings, you just click on “clear filters” here, and if you want this panel to go away, you simply click close.

00:01 So, now you’ve loaded your uncertainty, we have to load your risk, and we can do that on the left here where it says “Risk Register.” You just need to click here, and this will take you to this screen. Now, what you could do in this screen is you can just add events. So, we can click on the bottom here, and we can put a code on the event, we can give it a name, we can give it a probability distribution, either single value or uniform, and you can define that, the same with impact distribution, where you’ve got single value, uniform, or triangle.
00:36 This can create your score. You can give it a description, you can give an owner of this risk, and you can actually give a reoccurrence, and whether or not the risk is independent or not. You can import your risk register into here for your schedule. If you want to get rid of a risk, you simply click on this button here to remove a risk event. And with that, you’ve created your risk register; it’s very simple.

00:02 Now that our risk events or our risk register has been created, we can start to allocate risks to specific activities within the schedule. And to do that, at the top here, next to duration uncertainty, we click “Risk Events.” This changes these columns. Now, all you have to do to apply a risk to a WBS level or an activity is to click on these three buttons. And if we click on these, it is as simple as I can do cost recovery and sufficient test and suitable planes and rain, and all I do then is click off, and those have been applied.
00:41 Now, just like before, we have “inherit” here, so it’s passed all of those risks down the schedule. If you don’t have a risk assigned to a specific activity or WBS, it will say “map risk events” here. All you have to do is click on that, and it will take you to the same screen, and based on the settings that you did in your risk register and what you have applied, you will get a specific risk score, and it is as simple as that. Now, of course, just like we talked about before, you can filter, you can navigate your schedule,
01:14 in however which way you want, and you can assign the risks in whatever way one.

00:01 So now we’ve assigned our duration uncertainty and our risk events, it’s time to run a risk analysis, and this will be the shortest video in the series because all I do is go up to this green button and click it. It’s that simple. This screen tracks the progress of your QSRA being calculated. So, it will prepare the simulations, it’ll run them, and then it’ll tell you when they’re completed, and you’ll get a notification in a green box in the bottom right when they have been completed. So, you can go away, get a coffee, or get a drink of water.

00:01 So, I’ve just been informed that the QSRA has been completed. Now, I want to explore the results. It’s very simple. I can go up here to “Result,” and if I click on “Result,” it changes this screen. Now, it gives me the result for every single thing in the entire program, and I can interact with this. So, if I wanted a seventy, I could just go to there. I can display the finish date, I cannot display the finish date, I can download using this button here, and if I want to go to a different WBS or a different milestone or something like this,
00:35 I can do, and it will produce the P curve. Now, we might want to produce a bigger curve, and we might want to understand our tornado graphs, our risk drivers. To do that, we just go on the left here and go to “Risk Drivers.” If we click in here, a new screen will load. Now, what we have to do in this new screen is to click what activity we want to analyze. So, for this, I’m going to do plan completion, but I can choose anything. I’m going to analyze it for AP eighty position. This is relevant for the risk drivers. If you want to set a custom one, you
01:16 can do here, and we can put, we can type the position in, but I’m just going to do AP eighty. I’m going to do it for all duration, uncertainty, and risk events, and I’m not going to compare it with the previous update. All then I need to do is click “View Results.” It will take a couple of seconds, and then it’ll show me two things. The first thing they’ll show me is my tornado graph, my risk drivers. Now, by hovering over individual risk drivers, I can see what percentage of the end result they are driving.
01:51 And we can see here that risk number one is actually across the vast majority of the top twenty activities. I can also see that risk number seventeen is across, but its total contribution is 1.37 percent rather than 1.59 to this activity. We can also see that additional risk drivers drive a large amount of the risk. So, the risk in this program is distributed across. For the QSRA output, we can get our P curve graph. Again, this is fully interactive, so we can see here any AP result that we
02:30 possibly would want. If we wanted to go further, we could compare it to the previous update, and what we’d do is set a previous update, run QSRA in that one, and it would overlay the curves. We will do that in another video.

00:02 So now you’ve learned how to navigate the AI QSRA process flow in the Nodes & Links platform, but every business is different, and all experience is different. What I would highly recommend is that you find out from your company what their preferred settings are. In my experience, I’ve come across different settings, for example, on uncertainty distributions. Some companies like to stick with a P seventy or a P eighty position, or they like to stick with a templated plus or minus ten or fifteen percent, or they like to stick
00:38 with standardized risk across all of their projects. That is for the company and for you to decide what is best. What you can also decide is how often you want to run an AI QSRA, and using what methodology, and when those are triggered. So, for example, this is the standard flow that we do today: so we assign uncertainty at risk, we run the Monte Carlo simulation, we isolate the drivers for improvement. They can go off, for example, to commercials, then we send off to the risk team to execute the risk actions, and then after a period of time,
01:15 we’ll run it again. AI QSRA process flow that I’ve seen recently, because of the AI technology, is this: where people aren’t summarizing fifty thousand line schedules into five hundred line because of the AI, they can automatically assign, and because of the automations carrying between the different versions, they run them. And because of those time savings, every single change or every monthly update, they’re rerunning the same process because it’s as simple as a couple of button clicks. But again, you
01:50 are the expert. The AI and the system work for you. You can decide what is best.

00:01 So, this final section is just a bit of advice from me to you on how you can leverage the system to look great in your project, and I’ve got four pieces of advice. Number one is, if you’re running a risk workshop, you can use the AI components of the system to take a view on the uncertainty before you even walk in. Now, what that means is that you’ll already have triggers for people to go off. It’s much easier for people to go, “Well, I don’t think it’s that,” than it is for them to create numbers out of their head.
00:33 What this does is shorten down the time to run the workshops, and it also means that you can get to more specific answers faster. The second piece of advice is highly advised to rerun a QSRA for every single change. If a change comes through and it hasn’t impacted the critical path, normally it’s a bad idea to say no impact. We can rerun the QSRA and say what the risk impact is, and risk carries money. The third element, outside of the system, is to make sure you talk to your commercial department to get the value of a day.
01:12 What is the cost or the benefit of a day of delay or acceleration on AP position? If you have that, then you’re able to talk in numbers, not just time. And the fourth element is simulate, simulate, simulate. If you have an idea or something happens on the project, or a delay occurs, or there’s an idea for a risk change, or as an individual team thinks they can remove uncertainty or whatever else, you can simulate it very quickly to see how it’s going to impact your project. If you’ve got the value of a day, if you’re understanding what the key dates of
01:54 your project are, and what the risk distribution means for them, you are able to very quickly talk in the language of money and time. So, you can say, for example, if you are able to remove all uncertainty from these activities, we will save X days, which equates to Y pounds on this P position. With those things, you stand a good chance of looking amazing.

00:01 Hi everyone, I’m Greg the CEO of Nodes & Links. You’re about to learn how to run a risk analysis leveraging AI. By the end of this course, you’ll be an expert at using the AI QSRA system in the Nodes & Links AI platform. Please enjoy, like and comment.

00:42 So the QSRA system in the Nodes & Links platform is exactly the same as how you would run QSRA in the past with these four areas: Number one is that it’s a random sample Monte Carlo simulation running a thousand cycles. Number two is that you can add uncertainty and risk events just like you could in the past, and in a couple of minutes we’ll talk about how to do that and how to adjust the settings. Number three is that the outputs are PE curves and risk drivers, so you can get exactly the same outputs that you did previously. And number four is that you are in complete control. Yes, it has AI running throughout it and other advanced technologies, but that doesn’t matter – it is the familiar QSRA that you’ve had in the past and you are in control.

01:16 So now I’ve told you how the system is exactly the same as what you used in the past, let me tell you how it’s completely different. Number one, it has artificial intelligence, specifically it has machine learning, as evidenced in this column that suggests uncertainty distributions and likely durations. This is a 20-day duration activity. The machine learning is suggesting 22. I can turn it off and turn it on like so. Number two, it’s fully integrated into the rest of the system, this means that whenever a schedule is uploaded you have access to run a QSRA like this. Number three, it’s got special automations running throughout, so this button up here takes all of the settings, uncertainty and risk from a previous schedule that you can set and automatically imports them into your current schedule. This means you’re not sitting there clicking on updates where you’re transferring exactly the same settings across to see how things have changed – it’s now a single button click and it’s done for you. And the fourth thing is that it’s fast, really fast. We are on the cloud and we leverage the fastest computing chips that we possibly can. We have clocked 50,000 line schedules running a QSRA in less than 5 minutes. So with that, enjoy.

03:04 So now it’s time to start inputting the settings for our QSRA, and we start with uncertainty templates. At the top here if you click on this button, you are able to set the templates for minimum, probable and maximum duration. We can choose the percentages here, we can also choose the distribution what you would like, like either triangle or uniform. And what happens is that when you set those, you can start adjusting these settings naturally. So I can change how the distribution of uncertainty is on these events. This is if you do not want to use bespoke measures, so you input the data yourself, and if you do not want to use the artificial intelligence – the choice is yours.

03:42 Now that we’ve set our templates, we can choose our uncertainty measures and you have three options here. You can choose to go with the artificial intelligence, at which point you just click this button here and it will change the minimum, probable and maximum uncertainty. You can choose to go with one of your templates where we just click the template we want here. Or we can choose to program it ourselves, so for example this 20-day activity has a minimum at the moment of 17, I can just change that to 15 and press enter. This blue arrow means that this has been customized. I can also change the distribution, so I could change it for example to a uniform distribution. What you can additionally do as well is if you want to set the settings of a bulk of activities, you can click this “Inherit from WBS” button. So what that would mean is if you go to the level above, for example in this case it will be preliminaries, then anything below that has this button clicked, we can bulk click these buttons, will automatically have all of their settings adjusted. You see here how this one’s flicking this way, you can do thousands of activities at a time.

04:52 Finally, there is a way to filter, and this is a personal favorite of mine because what I would like to do is do a bulk template for the majority of activities, but for the activities that are within, let’s say, 20 days of total float of the critical path, I just put 20 in here and press enter, it will show me all of these, and I go into those, and that is what I personally run my risk workshops against. Now if we click on “Clear Filters” here, you can see that there’s a number of filters that you can play with, and these are for both uncertainty and risk events. You can do task information like ID, name, start, duration, you can start searching the WBS, you can look at float, and you can isolate by risk events. To clear settings you just click on “Clear Filters” here. If you want this panel to go away you simply click “Close”.

06:07 So now you’ve loaded your uncertainty, we have to load your risk, and we can do that on the left here where it says “Risk Register”. You just need to click here and this will take you to this screen. Now what you can do in this screen is you can just add events. So we can click on the bottom here and we can put a code on the event, we can give it a name, we can give it a probability distribution – either single value or uniform, and you can define that the same with impact distribution where you’ve got single value, uniform or triangle. This can create your score, you can give a description, you can give an owner of this risk, and you can actually give a reoccurrence and whether or not the risk is independent or not. You can import your risk register into here for your schedule if you want. To get rid of a risk event you simply click on this button here to remove a risk event. And with that you’ve created your risk register, it’s very simple.

07:23 Now that our risk events or our risk register has been created, we can start to allocate risks to specific activities within the schedule. And to do that, at the top here next to “Duration Uncertainty” we click “Risk Events”. This changes these columns. Now all you have to do to apply a risk to a WBS level or an activity is to click on these three buttons, and if we click on these it is as simple as – I can do “Cost Recovery”, “Insufficient Test”, “Unsuitable Planes” and “Rain”, and all I do then is click off and those have been applied. Now just like before, we have “Inherit” here so it’s passed all of those risks down the schedule. If you don’t have a risk assigned to a specific activity or WBS it will say “No Risk Events” here. All you have to do is click on that and it’ll take you to the same screen, and based on the settings that you did in your risk register and what you have applied, you will get a specific risk score. And it is as simple as that. Now of course, just like we talked about before, you can filter, you can navigate your schedule in whichever way you want, and you can assign the risk in whatever way you want.

08:33 So I’ve just been informed that the QSRA has been completed. Now I want to explore the results, it’s very simple. I can go up here to “Result” and if I click on “Result” it changes this screen. Now it gives me the result for every single thing in the entire program and I can interact with this. So if I wanted a P70 I could just go to there, I can display finish date, I can download using this button here, and if I want to go to a different WBS or a different milestone or something like this, I can do, and it will produce the PE curve. Now we might want to produce a bigger curve and we might want to understand our tornado graphs, our risk drivers. To do that we just go on the left here and go to “Risk Drivers”. If we click in here, a new screen will load.

09:14 Now what we have to do in this new screen is to click what activity we want to analyze, so for this I’m going to do “Plan Completion” but I can choose anything. I’m going to analyze it for a P80 position – this is relevant for the risk drivers. If you want to set a custom one you can do here, and we can type the position in, but I’m just going to do a P80. I’m going to do it for all durational uncertainty and risk events, and I’m not going to compare it with the previous update. All then I need to do is click “View Results”. It will take a couple of seconds and then it’ll show me two things. The first thing it will show me is my tornado graph, my risk drivers. Now by hovering over individual risk drivers, I can see what percentage of the end result they are driving. We can see here that risk number one is actually across the vast majority of the top 20 activities. I can also see that risk number 17 is across but its total contribution is 1.37% rather than 1.59% to this activity. We can also see that additional risk drivers drive a large amount of the risk, so the risk in this program is distributed across. For the QSRA output, we can get our PE curve graph again, this is fully interactive, so we can see here any P result that we possibly would want. If we wanted to go further, we could compare it to the previous update and what we do is set a previous update, run a QSRA in that one, and it would overlay the curves. We will do that in another video.

11:10 So now you’ve learned how to navigate the AI QSRA process flow in the Nodes & Links platform. But every business is different and all experience is different. What I would highly recommend is that you find out from your company what their preferred settings are. In my experience, I’ve come across different settings. For example, on uncertainty distributions some companies like to stick with a P70 or a P80 position, or they like to stick with an untemplated plus or minus 10 or 15%, or they like to stick with standardized risk across all of their projects. That is for the company and for you to decide what is best. What you can also decide is how often you want to run an AI QSRA and using what methodology, and when those are triggered.

11:52 So for example, this is the standard flow that we do today – so we assign uncertainty and risk, we run the Monte Carlo simulation, we isolate the drivers for improvement, they can go off for example to commercials, then we send off to the risk team to execute the risk actions, and then after a period of time we’ll run it again. The QSRA process flow that I’ve seen recently because of the AI technology is this: where people aren’t summarizing 50,000 line schedules into 500 line schedules because of the AI, they can automatically assign uncertainty and risk. And because of the automations carrying between the different versions, they run them. And because of those time savings, every single change or every monthly update they’re rerunning the same process, because it’s as simple as a couple of button clicks. But again, you are the expert, the AI in the system works for you. You can decide what is best.

13:02 So this final section is just a bit of advice from me to you on how you can leverage the system to look great in your project, and I’ve got four pieces of advice. Number one is if you’re running a risk workshop, you can use the AI components of the system to take a view on the uncertainty before you even walk in. Now what that means is that you’ll already have triggers for people to go off, it’s much easier for people to go “Well I don’t think it’s that” than it is for them to create numbers out of their head. What this does is shorten down the time to run the workshops, and it also means that you can get to more specific answers faster.

13:37 The second piece of advice is highly advised to rerun a QSRA for every single change. If a change comes through and it hasn’t impacted the critical path, normally it’s a bad idea to say no impact – we can rerun the QSRA and say what the risk impact is, and risk carries money.

The third element is, outside of the system, is to make sure you talk to your commercial department to get the value of a day – what is the cost or the benefit of a day of delay or acceleration on a P position? If you have that, then you’re able to talk in numbers, not just time.

14:19 And the fourth element is simulate, simulate, simulate. If you have an idea or something happens on the project, or a delay occurs, or there’s an idea for a risk change, or an individual team thinks they can remove uncertainty or whatever else, you can simulate it very quickly to see how it’s going to impact your project. If you’ve got the value of a day, if you’re understanding what the key dates of your project are and what the risk distribution means for them, you are able to very quickly talk in the language of money and time.

14:52 So you can say, for example, if you are able to remove all uncertainty from these activities, we will save X days which equates to Y on this P position. With those things, you stand a good chance of looking amazing.