AI-Driven What-if Analysis for Flawless Management Decisions
Be Confident in the Success of Your Multiple Projects
What-If Analysis is an AI-driven feature of Epicflow that shows you how project changes will affect your project environment in the future.
By enabling What-if Analysis, you switch to a special mode where you can test management decisions without applying them to your real projects.
Manage Uncertainty of Multi-Project Environment with Scenario Analysis
What-if Scenario Analysis as part of multi-project management software helps you make the right project decisions and manage uncertainty at your company.
If there are any project change requests or a necessity for project environment alterations (e.g., a request to initiate an extra project, illness of a critical resource, changed project requirements), you can try different scenarios in a simulated environment and choose the best one. After this analysis, you can be confident that the project decisions will bring the desired outcomes.
AI-Driven What-if Analysis for Efficient Project Portfolio Management
Upon entering the simulation mode in Epicflow, you find yourself in a test environment where you can make any changes to your projects and resources.
For example, you can move milestones, reassign tasks, reallocate resources across projects, add or remove tasks, change project scope, and more.
Any of these transformations won’t affect your real projects, but they will cause changes in your test environment in real time, so that you can choose the best one to make the right decision to improve your organizational performance.
Project Staggering: Let Epicflow Postpone the Start of Some Projects to Deliver on Time
To deliver your multiple concurrent projects on time, apply Project Staggering functionality if the data analysis in the system shows that a bottleneck is coming up. You can order your projects by their business values and set a certain number as a filter for staggering.
As a result, Epicflow will make calculations and suggest a new plan that will contribute to the timely delivery of the chosen projects (or all of them) in the Pipeline.
Load Simulation: Assign More Resources to Big Tasks to Cut Lead Time
Apply the Load Simulation functionality to see how changing the number of assigned resources will affect the duration of tasks. Choose the best option to make sure you don’t waste your time!
You don’t need to keep in mind all resource-related variables (capacity, availability, belonging to groups, and competences), Epicflow manages all the information and comes up with the best solutions.
Making In-Depth Analysis with What-if Simulation: Check the Effect of Project Changes on Different Levels
To choose the best scenario, check the effect of the changes you make during the What-if Analysis session in the Pipeline, Future Load graph, and Historical Load graph.
Exploring the Project Level with the Pipeline
Make changes and see an immediate effect in the Pipeline: projects’ colors and priorities will be revised. But examining this is not enough: it can happen that your projects are “green”, but you still have a problem at another level. The next step is researching the resource level.
Exploring the Resource Level with the Future Load Graph
It may happen that at the project level, your progress is fine, but at the resource level, it’s not. Even one resource group can cause the delay of all projects, but this effect will be visible too late when almost anything can’t be changed. The Future Load graph shows the resource workload and helps predict bottlenecks before they arise and jeopardize your projects.
If there’s just one overloaded group in your environment, and the projects in the Pipeline are blue and green (meaning there’s enough buffer time), in just a couple of months, there will be at least a couple of overloaded groups and missed milestones. Imagine what can happen in half a year!
Therefore, the right way to guarantee the successful delivery of your projects is to make sure no one is overloaded. And the Future Load graph, together with What-if Analysis, ensure the success of your projects with just a few clicks.
Sometimes you can see underload on the Future Load graph but can’t understand its origin because resources’ availability is usual. Then you can go to the Historical Load graph and check other variables: capacity, load, and ready-to-start tasks.
Historical load graph
On the Historical Load graph, you can detect overloaded and idle resource groups and use this data to balance their workload.
If one resource group is idle due to the other’s group’s overload, they can’t start their work and can’t complete it on time. As a result, this group becomes overloaded, too. This is caused by task dependency in a multi-project environment. You can see this on the graph, but you can hardly detect this gap manually.
Implementing Changes Based on the Analysis Results
You can download the simulation results by copying them to a clipboard or as a CSV file.
- As soon as you find the best scenario, just switch off the What-if Analysis mode and implement the changes that showed the best results.
- If no optimal solution is found, just ignore the transformations and initiate a new session when more related details appear.
- You can also save as many scenarios as you need right in the system and then play them and compare the results to choose the best one.
What’s important: Epicflow automatically schedules project plans as soon as new data appears in the system, which makes it super-easy to use different variables and “ask” Epicflow to make all calculations.
