The 2026 Master Class Webinar Series with Dr. David Hulett:

Part 1 - Utilizing the Risk Driver Method (an AACE Recommended Practice 57R-09) for Project Success

Schedules don’t fail because of one risk. They fail because risks ripple across many activities - sometimes entire project phases. These affect scheduled activities’ durations which have knock-on effects on total project cost.

In this first session of our Master Class Webinar Series, Dr. David Hulett introduces the Risk Driver Method, an approach recommended by AACE International, but still misunderstood or underused in practice.

Many project risks don’t add a fixed number of days to a single task. Instead, they influence multiple activities, often across project phases like engineering, construction, or commissioning. The Risk Driver Method makes it possible to map these overarching risks realistically, without forcing planners to guess or oversimplify impacts.

Applying risk drivers to multiple activities also creates positive correlation to the model so there is no need to estimate directly how activity duration pairs are correlated. Positive correlation between durations, if the activities are in the same schedule path, is a way that schedule overruns can be magnified.

In this webinar, you’ll learn how risk drivers:

• Capture the effect of risks that influence multiple activities.
• Generate correlation coefficients automatically during simulation.
• Provide a more realistic foundation for schedule and cost risk analysis.

If you’ve ever struggled with expressing the impact of a risk as “days added if it occurs,” when, in fact, the risk affects multiple activities, this session will change how you think about schedule uncertainty.

This recording is ideal for:

• Risk managers performing or supporting schedule risk analysis.
• Project controls professionals using (or considering) quantitative methods.
• Project planners and schedulers working with large, complex projects that are important to the success of the company.
• Anyone who wants a clearer, more realistic way to represent risk in schedules.

Speaker: 

David Hulett, Ph.D.FAACE

David Hulett provides consulting and training in project risk management and scheduling through Hulett & Associates, LLC. His clients span oil and gas refining, LNG, oil sands, gas pipelines, vertical construction, pharmaceuticals, transportation, aerospace and defense, and large science. His clients include commercial companies and several U.S. Government agencies including the DoE-NNSA, NASA, GAO, DHS, Architect of the Capitol and GSA. He specializes in quantitative integrated cost and schedule risk analysis and project scheduling, with clients across the US, Canada, Europe, South America, the Middle East, and South-Eastern Asia.

Dr. Hulett is active in the AACE International’s Decision and Risk Management community. He has authored or co-authored six AACE Recommended Practices and eleven articles in Cost Engineering, the AACE Journal. He is an AACE Fellow (2015), recipient of the Dunfield Educational Service Award (2018), and the Total Cost Management (TCM) Excellence award (2024). He has published books, on Practical Schedule Risk Analysis and Integrated Cost–Schedule Risk Analysis. For PMI, he managed the revision of the Risk Management chapter (Chapter 11) of the PMBOK® Guide (2000 and 3rd Edition), served on the Core Committee for the PMI Practice Standard for Scheduling, and was Deputy Project Manager for the PMI Practice Standard for Risk Management.