Thirty years on the tools
I'm a project-controls professional with over thirty years' experience — planning, progress measurement, cost control, document control, risk management and change management — across every project phase from front-end design through to construction. My background is primarily oil & gas, petrochemical, energy transition and heavy industrial capital projects, in both hands-on technical and senior managerial roles, leading multidisciplinary project-controls teams across many locations and contracting environments.
I've spent those years living in Primavera P6, Primavera Risk Analysis, MS Project and Milestones Professional — with Power BI and Power Query alongside — building, maintaining and defending hundreds of schedules. The risk workshops, the monthly QSRA that has to survive a sponsor, the forensic pass when a date slips: I've done the work these tools are supposed to support, on live commercial programmes, for a long time.
That's the difference I care about most: this wasn't specced by a marketing team. Every decision in the product answers a question I've actually had to answer on a real job.
The gap I kept hitting
The method for quantitative schedule risk analysis never stopped being right: map risk drivers to a CPM network, range the durations, correlate what moves together, simulate, commit at P80, mitigate the drivers. It's in the APM PRAM Guide and AACE 57R-09. What disappeared was an accessible tool.
Pertmaster became Primavera Risk Analysis and then quietly faded. The enterprise successors are genuinely capable, but they're priced and sold for organisations — quotes, seats, IT deployment. The analyst who needs a defensible P80 this month, without a six-week software request, was left improvising in spreadsheets. That's the person I built RunMonteCarlo for, because for fifteen years that person was often me.
What I insisted on
Because I've had to defend numbers in front of people who don't accept "the tool said so," the product is built on a few non-negotiables:
Your file never leaves your machine
The schedule and register are parsed and simulated in your browser. Not policy — physics. I wouldn't upload a client's live programme to a stranger's server, so the tool never asks you to.
Every number is traceable
Seed, settings and input hashes printed in the report; the method published in full. Anyone can re-run your analysis and get the same answer. That's how a new tool earns trust.
A price you can put on a card
Priced so an individual analyst never needs a procurement cycle to do their job. You know the number before there's ever a conversation.
Good enough to hand to a client
The output should look more credible than a screenshot pasted into Word — because in this field, a report that looks considered is a report people act on.
Part of a small workshop
I co-founded Vantis Project Intelligence Ltd (registered in England & Wales, company no. 17285923) — a UK company building advanced schedule-analytics software and providing expert project-controls consultancy across infrastructure, construction, oil & gas and defence. RunMonteCarlo is one of three browser-based tools in the suite, each taking something practitioners actually need and making it modern, honest and accessible:
Analyse Primavera P6 XER and MS Project files in the browser, no install: DCMA 14-point health checks, critical-path analysis (Appendix C chain + Appendix D attribution), SPI(t) Earned Schedule metrics, Monte Carlo QSRA, baseline-vs-revision comparison, delay attribution and Claim Brief generation — in seconds.
Turn a thousand-activity programme into a board-ready, one-page summary in minutes: native P6, MS Project, Excel and CSV import, milestone and Gantt summary views, an MS-Office-style interface, export to PDF, PowerPoint, PNG and self-contained HTML, and real-time end-to-end-encrypted co-editing.
QSRA and QCRA in the browser: build or import a risk register, set 3-point duration and cost ranges, and run a seeded Monte Carlo of up to 50,000 iterations for P50 / P80 / P90 dates and costs, tornado charts and a reproducible report pack — your files never leave your device.