Practical Risk Analysis for Project Planning: A Hands-On Guide using Excel

Projects are investments of resources for achieving a particular objective or set of objectives. Resources include time, money, manpower, and sometimes lives. Objectives include financial gain, social and health benefits, national goals, educational and scientific achievements, and reduction of suffering, among many others. Projects are undertaken by large and small organizations, by governments, non-profit organizations, private businesses, and by individuals. Determining whether to execute a project, or which project to execute among a set of possibilities is often a challenge with high stakes. Assessing the potential outcomes of a project can therefore be detrimental, leading to the importance of making informative decisions.

Practical Risk Analysis for Project Planning is a hands-on introduction to integrating numerical data and domain knowledge into popular spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheets, to arrive at informed project-planning decisions. The focus of the book is on formalizing domain expertise into numerical data, providing tools for assessing potential project performance, and evaluating performance under realistic uncertainty.

The book introduces basic principles for assessing potential project performance and risk under different scenarios, by addressing uncertainty that arises at different levels. It describes measures of expected performance and risk, presents approaches such as scenario building and Monte Carlo simulation for addressing uncertainty, and introduces methods for comparing competing projects and reducing risk via project portfolios.

A companion website to the book is available at www.RiskAnalysisBook.com

No special software is required except Excel or another spreadsheet software. While the book assumes no knowledge of statistics, operations research, or management science, it does rely on basic familiarity with Excel. Chapter exercises and examples of real projects are aimed at hands-on learning.

Author: Galit Shmueli
Publisher: Axelrod Schnall Publishers
Published: 07/14/2016
Pages: 114
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.47lbs
Size: 10.00h x 7.00w x 0.24d
ISBN: 9780991576685

About the Author
GALIT SHMUELI, PhD, is Distinguished Professor at the Institute of Service Science, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. She is co-author of the best-selling textbook Data Mining for Business Analytics, among other books and numerous publications in top journals. She has designed and instructed courses on forecasting, data mining, statistics and other data analytics topics at University of Maryland's Smith School of Business, the Indian School of Business, National Tsing Hua University and online at statistics.com

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