THEORY: All known project variables are known.
ADVANTAGES:
- All variables can be considered impartially. Minimizes prematurely “Jumping to Cause (pointing in a pre-chosen direction)”.
- Easy to learn. Studies have shown that the brain finds information easiest to absorb through pictures.
- Simple to present.
- Proper diagnosis combined with effectively implemented corrective action and senior management support will assure project success.
- Early problem detection buys management lead-time to weigh a wide range of choices.
- Can be used to evaluate a project in pre-mortem (what-if analysis) phase or any active phase or forensically, unraveling the subtle complex chain of events.
- Helps project teams to increase their intuition and evaluative abilities.
- Allows teams to pinpoint problem areas and critical success factors.
- Can serve as a pre-approval tool to identify/minimize risk.
- Reduces the amount of thinking to be done under pressure.
- Provides teams with a color tree analysis, which relies more on visual skills than on computing.
- Mapping allows the project picture to be filled in quickly, similar to a heat map.
- The model is built around a base of project management concepts.
- Results are used for objective, reliable, consistent decision making. By answering a large number of unbiased questions, grouping them by common attributes, responses become less arbitrary and less prone to subjective interpretation.
- Project Variable Analysis allows the team to think across many activities and provide a cross-sectional view of the project’s layers.
- Identifies concerns that might otherwise be overlooked in a less structured way.
- PVA is an inexpensive way to provide screening and diagnosis.
- Facilitates communication between individuals, using interactive yes/no questions, improving productivity.
- Serves as a reminder that project management is both an art and a science.
- Automating this process does not guarantee better accuracy. Many and most automated tools have prominent disclaimers.
- The model lets management (and less technical people) ask the right (and more intelligent) questions.
- The data, once in digital form, can be combined with other data, displayed, stored, reproduced and electronically transmitted.
- The model condenses large amounts of information.
- The variables act as a guide to show how not to do things, in order to understand how they should be done.
- Allows the firm to tighten procedures, practices and ethics rules.
- Model allows a project to be unpacked into its component parts, separating what is unforeseen, uncertain, known and unknown.
- Allows assumptions to be tested.
- Model is keyword/ fragmentary note searchable in .pdf format allowing evaluators to pinpoint potential issues.
- The model identifies the firm’s legacy processes/ ideas and actions/ customs, which could adversely affect the project’s outcomes.
- If used as part of a brainstorming process, should prevent individuals from exercising an outsized amount of influence on the rest of the team.
- The model helps SM/PM/team and contractors avoid making poor decisions