Our Deltek journey: why Acumen is the best risk modelling software for us
In the project world, the prioritisation of risk and uncertainty - and managing it effectively - has never been higher on the agenda. The pandemic showed us all the unpredictability of the world and, at Blueprint, we’ve seen first-hand how our clients have become more conscious to gain an early understanding of the potential risks and areas of uncertainty that could impact a project.
On the ground, this has meant more time spent on the risk management process upfront and greater confidence in prioritising risk and uncertainty into other key controls, such as timelines and budgets. All of this meant that it was no surprise that in mid-2020, one of our key clients reached out to us to advise on the best risk modelling software package, that in turn led us to our partnership with Deltek today.
How it began
As specialists in quantitative risk analysis, we were already familiar with the many risk modelling software packages on the market, but to deliver the best service for our clients, we were determined to find the best product out there to meet the specific requirements of our clients. After an extensive research exercise testing the market for options, Deltek quickly came out as the first choice. We then both recommended the software for implementation by our client and also invested in the software ourselves for use in all our quantitative risk analysis requirements.
There was no initial plan to form a long-term partnership with Deltek. We simply bought their product back in 2020 because we believed that their software was a market leader when it came to a single product that could carry out both schedule and cost risk models for our clients.
A relationship was built over this period that culminated in us being invited by Deltek to speak at their Deltek Insight 2021 event, to share our experience embedding Acumen Risk and the benefits we, and our clients, have enjoyed since using the software. As a result, a natural next step was to form a co-seller advocate partnership between Blueprint and Deltek.
What is Deltek's PPM Acumen?
Acumen is a suite of 3 distinct products known as ‘Fuse’, ‘Risk’ and ’360’:
Deltek Acumen Fuse diagnoses and resolves schedule shortcomings, helping you create the soundest schedules possible, and execute them with consistent success.
Deltek Acumen Risk helps you effectively account for and proactively reduce risk exposure for an accurate forecast you can rely on.
Deltek Acumen 360 generates schedule scenarios in real-time, allowing you to hypothesize acceleration opportunities or even threats of delay, and immediately see the impact.
Acumen benefits
As most project managers will know, for successful project delivery, proactive analysis of schedule risk and uncertainty is imperative. Deltek Acumen helps us to deliver Quantitative Risk Analysis for our clients, identifying possible risks and informing reports about the probability of these threats happening as well as the potential impact such risks can have on your project.
For us, Acumen has allowed us to move to a single product for all our risk modelling needs, with huge benefits to our clients and projects:
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The software has full uncertainty and discrete risk modelling capability with multiple methods of data entry, which can be imported directly from the schedule, within Acumen itself or via a spreadsheet, enabling us to create models and templates quicker than ever before. This simplicity has been key to helping our clients understand the data being modelled.
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For us, the tornado charts or ‘Risk Drivers’ as they are known in Acumen are a stand-out feature. In the past, quantifying how much uncertainty and risk were contributing to risk exposure was difficult to explain via other software to clients. But rather than a difficult-to-interpret coefficient or sensitivity percentage, Acumen provides real numbers in terms of days or cost allowing us to offer Tornado charts that any member of a project team can understand.
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Building on the understandable results theme, the Risk Exposure ‘S’ curve is a key feature that is used on all our projects. The histogram displays both a cumulative and non-cumulative chart showing the distribution of duration, cost, float, and start or finish dates for the project or individually selected activities or milestones. There is the ability to graphically plot contingency (the difference between a deterministic value and a P-value) at any given value allowing contingency values to be easily identifiable to all.
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A key benefit has been the ability to show our clients how different factors impact on the risk exposure across different scenarios, comparing these risk scenarios to make more realistic schedules and cost estimates and help with making smarter decisions to keep projects moving forward.
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We’ve also been able to better highlight how risk models impact the critical path, with top critical paths shown along with the percentage of times a specific occurs. The activities within the critical path are listed and the schedule can even be filtered where necessary.
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Risk-impacted dates and durations can be easily shown within the schedule activity view in Acumen, allowing multiple confidence level dates or costs to be shown against specific deliverables in the schedule.
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Finally, the best bit is that Acumen has the same comprehensive cost modelling capability, with the same outputs available as with schedule, including Risk Exposure charts, exposure comparison functions and the Tornado charts. Cost models can either be run independently of the schedule or using our preferred method of combined schedule and cost modelling to ensure the impact of schedule prolongation gets factored into the cost estimate. This allows us to provide our clients with a comprehensive risk modelling service with a standardised data set for them to understand across both schedule and cost.
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A major benefit of using Acumen Risk is that it includes Acumen Fuse, Deltek’s market leading schedule diagnostic product. This provides us with the ability to check schedules are of sufficient quality for risk analysis against a comprehensive list of criteria including industry standards such as DCMA 14 point. This has enabled us to develop the highest standard of modelling schedules for our clients and ensure that time isn’t wasted running models on schedules that aren’t of sufficient quality to produce reliable outputs.
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Also included is Acumen 360, also known as the ‘Accelerator’, this is a schedule scenario tool capable of assisting planners with schedule acceleration (or deceleration) and recovery effortlessly, in seconds.
The truth is that in the world of project controls, the pressure to complete projects faster and cheaper will always be there. However, using software such as Acumen 360 has helped us to make the task of producing what-ifs and accelerating a schedule to meet contractually-driven requirements less difficult and time-consuming.
Conclusion
The above features helped our team to develop more realistic risk adjusted schedules and cost estimates that are customisable to an individual project. Acumen Risk provides our clients with highly visual and simple to understand outputs, helping project teams to make more informed decisions and increase efficiency. Due to Acumen, we no longer feel like clients have to be risk specialists to understand the data, and any member of the project team can use the results - whether that be across schedule or cost.
What started off as a genuine appreciation for the excellence of their product has now flourished into a partnership that is beneficial to both organisations. Deltek clearly shares many of the same values as us so the partnership felt like the right thing to do, not just for our team, but also to help us provide our clients with expertise and delivery where they need it most.