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Software Project Management under Uncertainties
Event Chain Methodology and
Psychological Issues
Event chains methodology is designed to mitigate negative impact of heuristics related to estimation of project uncertainties:
1. The task duration, start and finish time, cost, and other project input parameters can be influenced by motivational factors such as total project duration to much greater extend than events and event chains. It happens because events cannot be easily translated into the duration, finish time, etc. Therefore, event chain methodology can help to mitigate certain effects of selective perception in project management.
2. The event chains methodology relies on estimation of duration based on focused work on activity and does not necessarily require low, base, and high estimation or statistical distribution; therefore, the negative effect of anchoring can be mitigated.
3. The probability of event can be easily calculated based on historical data. It helps to mitigate the effect of the availability heuristic. The probability equals the number of times an event actually occurred in previous projects divided by total number of situations when event could have occurred. In classic Monte Carlo simulations, the statistical distribution of input parameters can also be obtained from the historical data; however, the procedure is more complicated and rarely used in practical software project management.
4. The compound events can be easy broken into smaller events. Information about these small events can be supported by reliable historical data. This mitigates the effect of biases in estimation of probability and risk.
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