Drivers

Drivers

It is essential to clarify what Risk Drivers mean in Safran terminology. Within our project plan, we identify risks, assign them to the related activities, and calculate their impacts. As we have already seen, a project activity may be affected by one or more risk impacts.

We can define risk drivers as the elements (or factors /causes) that may lead to different project outcomes than those we have planned.

Safran Risk lists project finish and project cost risk drivers on the left-hand side, as well as activity project finish and cost drivers on the right-hand side.

The risk drivers are ranked by those risks that, during the simulations, were most tightly correlated to either delays in the project finish or overspends in the project cost.

Similarly, the activity drivers are ranked by those activities that, during the simulations, were most tightly correlated to either delays in the project finish or overspends in the project cost.

In the presented tornado charts, you can right-click on the label and select to be redirected to the corresponding element(e.g., Risk, activity, or cost element).

By selecting an element (e.g., an activity) in the tree to the left, you can look at what's driving that element instead of the entire project.

For activities, you can see a tornado called Criticality. This shows how often the activities are on the critical path.

Any graphs you choose can be exported as an image by clicking either of the two export icons in the ribbon. Images can be copied to the clipboard or saved as a '.PNG' image file.

Driver Options

Several Options in the drivers tab let you choose how the values are calculated and what the tornados should look like.

Driver Calculations

Here, you can select the correlation calculation method. Either Spearman or Pearson.

Tornado Options

Here, you can choose what the graphs should look like and how many risks and activities should be included.

For activities, you can select the method for calculating the drivers. The options are: