Duration Sensitivity report

You use the Duration Sensitivity report to identify the tasks in a project that are most likely to affect the finish date of the project if their duration is changed - ie the tasks most likely to cause delays unless they are monitored closely.

The Duration Sensitivity report indicates the correlation between the duration of individual tasks and the overall elapsed duration of the project (or the duration of the current branch or view, depending on the scope of the last risk analysis operation). The correlation is calculated using either Pearson's Product Moment Correlation Coefficient or Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient. Both correlation coefficients return a value in the range between -1.0 and 1.0 for each task. The sensitivity report converts these values into percentages in the range between -100% and 100%. You can interpret the values as follows:

A value of -100% indicates an exact negative correlation between the duration of a task being reduced and the finish date of the project increasing. It is worth noting that a -100% correlation would be extremely rare in Asta Powerproject data.
A value of 100% indicates an exact positive correlation between the duration of a task being increased and the finish date of the project increasing.
A value of 0% indicates that there is no correlation between the duration of a task being increased and the finish date of the project increasing.

The tasks with the highest percentages are those most likely to cause delays. The report lists the tasks in descending order of percentage - whether the percentage is positive or negative. For example, any tasks with percentages of -100% and 100% are listed first, followed by tasks with percentages of -99% and 99%, and so on. You can specify the maximum number of tasks to include in the report. If, for example, you choose to include a maximum of 100 tasks in the report, the report lists the 100 tasks in the project that are most likely to cause delays.

Bear in mind that correlation does not equal causation: a high positive or negative correlation does not necessarily mean that the duration of a task being increased or reduced will definitely result in the duration of the project being increased; it merely means that the duration of the task happened to be lower or higher in many iterations in which the duration of the project increased.

To access the Duration Sensitivity report:

Click the Reports control on the Results tab of the Risk Analysis dialog and select Sensitivity. The Sensitivity Reports dialog appears.
Click the Duration Sensitivity tab.