Exam 9: Project Scheduling: Networks, Duration Estimation, and Critical Path

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Probability suggests that the amount of time that an activity is likely to take is rarely deterministic; rather it is stochastic and found as the result of sampling a range of likelihoods of the event occurring. These likelihoods range from zero to one. In order to derive a reasonable estimate for the activity's duration, we identify the activity's most likely, pessimistic, and optimistic durations. From these time estimates we can use a symmetrical or asymmetrical probability distribution to develop a mean and standard deviation for each activity. A normal distribution might be used if the optimistic and pessimistic estimates are symmetrical to the mean and a beta distribution can be employed if the estimates are asymmetrical. The goal is to achieve a high level of confidence for the probability estimates; the higher the better in order to achieve a better estimate for the project duration.