We had been warned by our in house testers that Ms Project 2007 and Risk+
didn't appear to be completely compatible (extended run times, random errors,
program hanging forever). When our corporation moved to office 2007, a small
group of schedulers and engineers kept Ms Project 2003 instead of moving to
2007. On a monthly basis, we run Risk+ simulations on relatively large
schedules (7,000 to 10,000 tasks), with 2,000 to 4,000 iterations. These
runs take 2 to 8 hours on a multiprocessor HP engineering workstation, and
are consistent enough that the time variations between runs of a given
schedule is less than five percent, depending primarily on what else is
running during the Risk+ simulation. Our simulation runs are primarily done
to generate S-Curves & completion confidence intervals for particular tasks.
Things that we’ve found that cause a large jump in run time is to include
“Duration Analysisâ€, Cost Analysisâ€, “Critical Path Analysisâ€, and
“Sensitivity Analysisâ€.
My own history with Risk+ started before Deltek acquired the product from CS
Solutions. I tried working with the CS Solutions programming team assigned
to support Risk+. What I was eventually told by the team lead was that when
CS Solutions acquired the product from ProjectGear Inc, they got the source
code, with little knowledge of how or why it worked, and as long as the
product sold, weren’t willing to even work on known bugs. When Deltek
acquired the product, we still had maintenance contracts, and tried again to
work with the Deltek developers, with the same result – about the only change
they were willing to make was to replace “CS Solutions†name in the product
with “Deltek Systemsâ€.
The current drive at our corporate level is to move to Oracle Primavera, but
with our customers are still requesting Ms Project 2003 schedules with Risk+
analysis, we have to convince our customers that Oracle will provide better
long term support than Deltek has provided.
