Edition 1 · August 2026

The Quantitative Schedule Risk Analysis Handbook

Ten chapters on doing schedule risk analysis honestly – free, no signup, no gate. Written by the team behind Epoch SRA; useful whichever tool you use.

Start reading – Chapter 1 Download the PDF

Why single dates lie
Every program we have worked on had two schedules.
Merge bias: the arithmetic of being late
Here is the whole chapter in three sentences. Two parallel paths, each 90% likely to finish by March, give the point where they merge an 81% chance of…
Reading a distribution: what P80 promises and what it doesn't
A schedule risk analysis does not produce a date. It produces a distribution of dates – typically from tens of thousands of simulated program futures –…
Is your schedule analyzable?
Before running any simulation, ask a harder question: is your schedule a network, or a drawing of one?
From risk register to simulation
Every program keeps a risk register. Almost none of them are connected to the schedule. Likelihood and severity get scored, the heat map gets presented –…
Sensitivity: measured, not assumed
Two rankings of the same risks. The first: sorted by likelihood × severity, the register's own arithmetic. The second: sorted by how much each risk…
Calibration: whose numbers, and why trust them
A Monte Carlo simulation is arithmetic on assumptions. The arithmetic is never wrong; the assumptions usually are. Calibration is the discipline of…
Cost through the schedule
Schedule risk and cost risk are usually analyzed by different people with different tools, then stapled together in a review. The staple is the weakness:…
Running an SRA your review board believes
The mathematics of the previous chapters fail for a non-mathematical reason more often than any other: the room does not believe the numbers. Belief is…
Choosing tools: the questions that matter
This chapter is deliberately vendor-neutral, ours included. The SRA tool market is small and genuinely differentiated – enterprise platforms, scheduler…

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