Improvement for traditional PERT based on rational risk aversion

Because of the rational circumvent of the perceived risks and the extended responsibility, project schedule always tend to be conservative, which may cause more waste of safety time in the implementation of projects, and make project management inefficient and cost over-run. This paper introduces a “compensation factor”, which is applied to amend activity durations in traditional PERT in order to make the project schedule more practical. By this method, we can shorten the calculated duration and cumulate all “compensation factor” as a buffer time, which will be put it at the end of the critical path. This new method can help project managers to make a flexible use of the duration of each activity.