Why Is Full Monte So Fast and Does It Matter?

Barbecana, the new name in schedule risk analysis, offers Full Monte.  Full Monte operates as a Microsoft Project add-in and has proven to be one of the fastest risk analysis tools currently in production.

Full Monte – Fast, Accurate Risk Analysis

The speed of Full Monte often amazes people.  A recent test showed it to be about 130 times as fast as another schedule risk analysis add-in.  The main reason for this is that all the algorithms are coded from scratch in Full Monte, rather than using functionality in Microsoft Project.  Another risk analysis software competitor stores the duration samples in the duration field before getting Project to do the time analysis.  Another possibility would be to do the time analysis internally but to use Project to do the basic date calculations.  (A date calculation is when a duration is added to a date, or two dates are subtracted to obtain a duration, having regard to the relevant calendar.)  Project supports a wide range of calendar exceptions (e.g. the third Thursday of November every year) which makes date calculations quite complex and potentially time-consuming.

The big potential overhead is in the communication channel between a Microsoft Project Add-in and Project, and Full Monte minimizes its usage of this channel by getting its data once at the start of processing and putting its results back once at the end of processing.  Other risk analysis software and project management tools need to communicate with Project multiple times on every iteration.

But does it matter?  Speed makes it more acceptable to do relatively large numbers of iterations especially on large networks.   The larger the network the more important it is to do a large number of iterations, to ensure that one gets a representative sample from each task.  But also of course the larger the network the longer each iteration takes.  So the time taken to get a good sample is likely to go up as the square of the number of tasks.  Full Monte can do 1000 iterations on a 3600 task network in about half a minute on a modern laptop.

When you need risk analysis software that is fast, accurate and easy to integrate with your current Project management tools, you need Barbecana’s Full Monte – Contact us today!  Click here to download a FREE 30-day trial of Full Monte.