ABSTRACT
Spreadsheets are the mainstay of any project manager’s toolkit. A spreadsheet can be an effective means to document and monitor the status of project risks that team may be facing, or be used as a database to monitor resource allocation on projects. Some software packages are coming into use for project risk management and the product development process. These have their place, but they will not replace the spreadsheet, the extreme flexibility of which will always be useful for quick analyses and special situations. For analyzing project risks, the basic unit will most likely be days or weeks of project delay. If the people do use a monetary basis and have an unusually long project, they can use net present values—usually relative to the left end of the tree—to account for the time value of money. The objective of the design structure matrix is to analyze the sequence of project activities in order to manage the not-yet-available information.
