A new approach for quantitative risk analysis

Project risk management aims to provide insight into the risk profile of a project as to facilitate decision makers to mitigate the impact of risks on project objectives such as budget and time. A popular approach to determine where to focus mitigation efforts, is the use of so-called ranking indices (e.g., the criticality index, the significance index etc.). Ranking indices allow the ranking of project activities (or risks) based on the impact they have on project objectives. A distinction needs to be made between activity-based ranking indices (those that rank activities) and risk-driven ranking indices (those that rank risks). Because different ranking indices result in different rankings of activities and risks, one might wonder which ranking index is best. In this article, we provide an answer to this question. Our contribution is threefold: (1) we set up a large computational experiment to assess the efficiency of ranking indices in the mitigation of risks, (2) we develop two new ranking indices that outperform existing ranking indices and (3) we show that a risk-driven approach is more effective than an activity-based approach.