Life after Pertmaster: what a modern QSRA tool looks like

For a generation of planners, "running the risk model" meant one thing: Pertmaster. Oracle acquired it in 2006, rebadged it Primavera Risk Analysis, and then let it age: a desktop product with a 2000s interface, painful licensing, and a fade from the price list that left teams clinging to installers they weren't sure would activate next year. The method didn't stop being right. The tooling stopped being available.

What the veterans actually miss

Talk to people who ran QSRA in Pertmaster's heyday and a consistent list emerges: risk drivers mapped to activities, three-point ranges applied by WBS branch or activity code rather than row by row, correlation you could defend, fragnet-style delay events, criticality and tornado views, and a report a reviewer would accept. That list is the real specification for any successor — and it's the checklist we built RunMonteCarlo against, method first (every formula published, engine validated against closed-form networks).

What 2026 should add

• No install, no IT ticket. The analyst who needs a QSRA this week rarely controls their machine. A browser tool ends the six-week software-request saga.
• No upload. Programmes are commercially sensitive. Parsing the XER in the browser — so the schedule never touches a server — turns the security review from a blocker into a sentence.
• The monthly cycle as a first-class feature. The old workflow died at month two, when a new XER meant rebuilding the model. Re-linking the register and ranges to the updated schedule — automatically, with a report of what changed — is what makes QSRA a control rather than an event. (Case study 02 shows the round trip.)
• A schedule-quality gate. Simulating a broken network was always the field's dirty secret. A DCMA-aligned readiness check belongs in front of the Run button.
• Workshop reality. Risk owners won't buy licences. Sending an owner an editable review file that works in any browser, then merging their edits with approval, matches how registers actually get built.
• Reproducibility as a feature, not a footnote. Seeded runs, engine version in the report, same file + same seed = same answer, forever.

The honest landscape

Safran Risk and Deltek Acumen Risk are capable enterprise successors — desktop, per-seat quotes typically in the thousands per year, worth it for organisations living in that ecosystem daily. Full Monte plugs into P6/MSP natively. @RISK simulates spreadsheets brilliantly but doesn't speak CPM. The gap was never at the top of the market: it's the analyst, consultancy or contractor who needs proper QSRA monthly, priced like the SaaS tools they already use. That's the slot RunMonteCarlo occupies — free tier for the register and preview runs, £99/year for the lot, which is not a typo; it's roughly what one day of a risk consultant's time costs per year.

The method survived the product

Pertmaster's real legacy isn't the binary — it's the practice: map risks to logic, range the durations, correlate what moves together, simulate the network, commit at P80, and mitigate the drivers. That practice is standards-backed (APM PRAM, AACE 57R-09) and outlived its most famous implementation. The tools should now be as good as the method. That's the bar we're building to.